


and the wall leaned away (or: The Pros and Cons of Tilling)

by toomanyhometowns



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: 2012 Québec Student Protests, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Ugly Grantaire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 15:35:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5503187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toomanyhometowns/pseuds/toomanyhometowns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a sudden tension at one end of the table: an indrawn breath, an electromagnet switched on. Courfeyrac glances towards the head of the table, and Grantaire--her peripheral vision blinkered by her hood--is treated to a truly exciting display of alarm from him. Courfeyrac opens his mouth, about to cut off--</p><p>"If you need a date for the night…"</p><p>And he's too late. Grantaire turns, and catches Enjolras's gaze full in the face.</p><p>--</p><p>(In which Grantaire's having a Week, but it could be so, so much worse. It could be last year.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	and the wall leaned away (or: The Pros and Cons of Tilling)

**Author's Note:**

> translations available if you hover comme ça, or as footnotes.[1]  
> ! this started with a couple shallow thoughts ("french names + north american writers... why are les amis never québecois?" "there is never enough fake-dating" "ugly girl R would have a shitty time of it" "gosh there's some [good](http://et-in-arkadia.tumblr.com/post/51820142627/snailsushi-there-is-more-to-Grantaire-than-his) (slightly grumpy) [meta](http://angualupin.tumblr.com/post/63864200621/gauzythreads-angualupin-gauzythreads) out there" "facebook debates are soul-sucking") and spiralled. i hope it spiralled well!
> 
> massive, MASSIVE thanks to [psidn](http://psidn.tumblr.com), without whom this would not have been plotted out, much less written! you are an inspiration and a perfect enabler, bb, keep it up. <3  
> additional massive thanks to [thought](http://thought-.tumblr.com) for catching rogue words and being extremely freaking reassuring. i wouldn't feel okay posting this if you hadn't looked it over, fr srs.
> 
> title from The National's [slow show](http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/national/slowshow.html), more so its [Coeur de Pirate cover](https://www.listenonrepeat.com/watch?v=dKPoQmwCfoQ). (the other half of the title is a special gift to thought, u r welcome friend)

"Bossuet can't come tonight," Joly says, giving up his backpack to Musichetta's waiting embrace, bypassing the puddle of Grantaire drooped over the tabletop.

Grantaire supposes Musichetta tucks it onto the ledge that the booth makes against the wall. She can't look up, though, because she's becoming one with the table. It's important that someone study the grain of the wood, memorise its loops and curves.

"How come?" Musichetta asks, half-standing to meet Joly's kiss hello. They're sweet, and Grantaire's happy that those three crazy kids have gotten together; however, she also would like to disappear into the tabletop, and the tiny reminder of her friends' well-adjustedness only makes the pull to become inanimate more urgent.

Joly makes a noise that means he's pulling a sad face, grimacing and sipping air through his teeth. Someday, Grantaire hopes she'll be able to hear it without expecting _I think--it looked pretty broken_ to follow. "It's possible he asked me to wake him up after forty minutes, and I let him sleep for three hours?"

"I approve," Musichetta says, and there's the soft slap of a high five as Joly settles into the booth opposite her.

"So, what's going on here?" he asks. "R, are _you_ ready for your show this weekend? Bossuet's still scrambling to finish up."

Somewhere behind the skin of Grantaire's throat, a groan stretches its limbs.

"She is." Musichetta has all the force and conviction that Grantaire craves. Her hand cups Grantaire's shoulder blade like Musichetta senses the panic brewing between Grantaire's ribs and wants to cut it off before it spreads.

"She is emphatically _not_ ," Grantaire says, twisting to shoot a baleful look at Musichetta. "Since her moral support slash 'fuck the haters' date has cancelled on her, abandoning her to a Saturday night of lonely misery." Strange, it seems the more she whines, the less seriously Musichetta takes her. "Also, both of her pieces are atrocious, but that's old news."

Joly pats her head gingerly, because he is a good friend. "I'm going to grab a drink, what are you having?" he asks, and forget 'good friend', he is now officially Grantaire's top-ranked friend, having catapulted past the inconstant Musichetta, the absent Eponine, and the over-booked Cosette.

For him, Grantaire could even sit upright. "I'll have whatever you're having," she says, peeling herself off the tabletop. "Only maybe more of it."

"Done," he promises, and slides out of the booth in a motion far too spritely for a med student nearing the end of term.

"And a water," Musichetta calls after him; he acknowledges the addition by raising his cane's handle up to his temple, a sort of abbreviated salute.

"Nothing stronger?" Grantaire asks.

Musichetta shrugs. "Maybe later."

"Don't wait too long, now." A tap to the nose, a warning point, a serious look over the ghost of glasses Grantaire hasn't worn in public for years. "The rest of the gang will swarm in and you'll be trapped in booth purgatory, reliant on their generosity to keep your whistle wet." 

"No, it's more that if I'm going to be helping with catering Saturday, on top of the volunteer party stuff, I feel like I should have all my wits about me for the meeting. Avoid signing up for any more actual involvement." The wry quirk of Musichetta's lips speaks volumes. Someday, Grantaire will succeed in drawing something with half as much expressivity.

Grantaire spins her coaster, some corner of her mind hoping the gesture will distract from her unwilling smile. Poor Musichetta--she'd come so close to graduating without ever having to organize an Amis de la Pomme de Terre event, only to be roped in at the eleventh hour. "You should've learned from your wise and wizened fourth-year mentor, Granny Grantaire: show up for service, drink through the meetings, never, ever volunteer."

"Speaking of which--" Joly thumps back into his seat, says, "I ordered, Dan's going to bring them over," in response to Grantaire's piteous face at his empty hands. " _Speaking_ of which," he continues. "You're here awfully early tonight for people who vowed to do the bare minimum for the rest of the term."

Joly waves over their shoulders at some new arrival. Grantaire is an old hand at resisting the urge to check for Enjolras's presence; she trains her eyes on Joly and answers him. "Musichetta lured me here to break my heart, and now I'm lying in wait to see if Eponine will piece it back together."

Musichetta translates, "I asked her to show up a few minutes early so we could figure out an alternative plan for Saturday, since I'm going to be filling in on the catering gig and can't _My Best Friend's Wedding_ her art show with her."

"Thanks again for stepping up for QPIRG thing," Courfeyrac says easily, scooting into the booth next to Joly. "I forgot I wouldn't have the car that weekend--you're really saving us."

Grantaire tips tiny nods hello at him and Marius as they get themselves situated, and spares another nod for Enjolras. She tries to feel not so much like she's baring her throat to her, hunches into her hoodie to reverse the damage.

"My pleasure," Musichetta says, and Grantaire needs better impulse control, because then maybe she wouldn't pull grotesque faces every time the urge strikes her.

"Do you think we need another table?" Enjolras asks. She's the only one left standing, poised at the head of the table, all perfect posture and artfully ripped t-shirt. Normally, Grantaire would hate the waste of fabric, the affected shabbiness. The shirt looks soft against Enjolras's neck, which is tilted in a graceful sweep as she considers the table.

Dan's taking far too long with the drinks.

While Enjolras and Marius account for the other active PDT members ("Cosette?" "Studying." "And Combeferre said--" "Wait, we don't need quorum for today, do we?"), Courfeyrac leans in. "What's this about Musichetta and your guys's show? I thought it was Sunday."

The whole mess shapes itself into a leaden block in Grantaire's mind, and she squishes her face with both hands to try to get rid of whatever expression is undoubtedly giving her away. "It's nothing," she says into her palms, wills the words to sink into the cracks and crevices of her skin and disappear. Lying in English doesn't feel as bad, somehow. "I'm just being childish, and Musichetta's taking away my security blanket, pushing me out of the nest for my own good."

"I was supposed to be R's date for the private showcase, on Saturday," Musichetta says. She leans slightly against Grantaire, an apologetic weight. "The assholes were getting her down, and she wanted to go out with a big, gay, see-my-super-hot-girlfriend-and-envy-me bang."

Joly, not being an idiot, mouths something along the lines of _extra-super-hot_ to her, and Musichetta, not being entirely made of stone, shares a wicked little smile with him.

Courfeyrac, bless him, doesn't let pity touch his features. He winces in fellow-feeling. "And now you can't make it because I roped you into catering."

"And Cosette's been stolen by that self-same villain. But it's one night--a molehill, not a mountain," Grantaire says. She waves a hand, hoping to bat the topic off to the side for the time being. "Besides, I have enough solid blackmail on Eponine that all hope is not lost; she may be swayed into subbing for Musichetta in our deceit."

There's a muted wooden scrape as Enjolras tugs a chair up to the head of the table; evidently she and Marius had decided another table wasn't worth the bother. Grantaire looks away as Enjolras turns to drape her scarf over the chair back.

Marius reaches out to Grantaire, checks the gesture halfway through and settles his hand on his own lap. His voice is a stew of all the embarrassed pity that Courfeyrac had foregone; it settles, rotten, in Grantaire's ears. "Grantaire, you remember that Eponine isn't around this weekend, right?"

And oh, that's her heart sinking. "I clearly don't," she says, and doesn't fight to keep the annoyance from her tone. Her consonants bristle at Marius, hiss in shallow satisfaction at the chastened set to his shoulders.

"She'll be out in the banlieue to see Gavroche and Azelma," Enjolras says. Her elbow is on the table, her chin resting on the deliberate curve of her fingers. Her eyebrows are raised--unimpressed. "She'll be there all weekend, that's why we couldn't use her car for the event on Saturday."

Grantaire fills in the '... _which you'd've known if you ever listened_ ' on her own, quietly in her head.

The table presents their assorted sympathies, not nearly as welcome as the pint-and-a-half of sympathy that Dan delivers at long last.

"If anyone would buy that uh…" the ellipsis raises a demonstrative frame to Grantaire's flannel hoodie, short hair, Doc Martens, and all-round Sapphic mien that slowly, surely, have begun to make her feel right. "... you would date me, I'd be happy to help out," Marius volunteers, and Grantaire drinks deeply to chase away the coil of guilt that seizes her stomach. She'd been rude, she didn't deserve--

"You're sweet as can be," Grantaire says, jostling his shoulder slightly to disperse the sincerity hanging off her words. "But that'd be uh…" 

(Worse. The idea of showing up with Marius on her arm, or her on _his_ , nearly drives her to raise her hood, push back against the hard wood of the booth and be swallowed up. Going with a dude would be fucking giving _in_.)

(( _Yeah, but does Grantaire even count? I mean, no woman would touch her_...))

"It's fine. I'll just grace the good Bossuet with my company when I feel lonesome. I'm sure I can take refuge in the gentle harbours of the print media crowd," she says. She gives in to the urge to pull up her hood, her peripheral vision swallowed by fuzz and red and black. "Now if I'm not mistaken, we have some actual work to talk about? We could even get started early, wouldn't that be something!"

In another world, she's allowed to lean back and pretend to ignore it when Musichetta sneaks a subtle, comforting hand onto hers. The impending disaster turns out to be good for a free pint the next time Grantaire is out with Eponine, and generally her life rolls along in its usual tracks.

In this world, however, there's a sudden tension at one end of the table: an indrawn breath, an electromagnet switched on. Courfeyrac glances towards the head of the table, and Grantaire--her peripheral vision blinkered by her hood--is treated to a truly exciting display of alarm from him. Courfeyrac opens his mouth, about to cut off--

"If you need a date for the night…"

And he's too late. Grantaire turns, and catches Enjolras's gaze full in the face.

There's an aura about Enjolras sometimes, a sort of purposefulness that Grantaire has no defenses against. Mostly her best bet is to avoid, avoid, avoid, never be caught in the field of Enjolras's ruthless focus. It means that on the rare occasions when it happens, Grantaire's built up no resistance at all. Some small speck of her mind charts the flurry of significant eye contact around their table, the cold sweat on the back of her neck, but for a long beat, everything about Grantaire is reduced to the act of being someone watching Enjolras.

Enjolras who is chilled. Enjolras who is expectant. Enjolras who is--Grantaire flatters herself to believe-- _offended_ that this discussion had had an unspoken understanding excluding her from negotiations.

Grantaire is laughing, she comes to realise. It's been a while since she's been caught off-guard like this, and she doesn't like the way her diaphragm jerks on each gasp. But it's _funny_ , and it's funnier because of the indignation building up in Enjolras's shoulders.

"It's an offer," Enjolras says, and oh, that indignation is tempered with hurt, and if Grantaire had ever needed a reminder of how little she deserves Enjolras's attention, here it is.

She drinks air, wills the hysteria away. This is serious, this is serious, this is serious. "Sorry," reflexive, and: "That won't be necessary." If she's still wild around the eyes then she'll just hope it's read as honesty. "It's only our private showings and defenses, it'll be boring but tolerable: profs, students, and plus-ones, everyone fighting to convince themselves their art is revelatory." Grantaire can see that nothing she's saying is doing anything to deter Enjolras, but she can't help throwing more useless words at her. "You don't need to come. I can stroll around in my natural habitat, double-fisting free wine and schmoozing with art people, then Sunday you can swarm in with whoever else of these unwashed masses would like to attend, if this mood hasn't released you by then."

"I was planning on stopping by Sunday, you can come with me," Courfeyrac says in a blatant and doomed attempt to derail this calamitous train of events.

Enjolras cocks a dark, logical brow. "If it won't be so bad, why bother lining up Musichetta as a date?"

Hopefully, the yawning silence that follows Enjolras's question is only in Grantaire's head.

"Wasn't it just because of that dick who cornered you last year?"

Bad luck, Marius had heard the silence too, and being a deep-down decent fellow, had decided to pitch in.

"No need to exaggerate," Grantaire grits through a smile. Courfeyrac makes a sharp, hopeless gesture in Marius's direction, _please undo what you've done_ , but it's too late. Enjolras's other eyebrow has climbed to join the first, and now she's _concerned_ , now she's _invested_ , now Grantaire's another objective to be reached.

"I mean--yeah, no, it actually didn't sound that bad," Marius amends. In fairness to him, there's no way anybody could switch tacks elegantly in this situation. He probably hasn't made it any worse.

Courfeyrac and Joly, well-intentioned to the last, pile on after him: "Grantaire's a big girl, she can take care of herself," and "It'll definitely be better this year, though," (respectively) are not the effective reassurances they seem to expect them to be.

Musichetta winces. That, Grantaire can get behind.

With an eloquent roll of her eyes, Enjolras dismisses the menfolk's opinions out of hand. "Don't be stubborn, I can come. I'd be happy to come," she revises under the weight of the internal etiquette that Grantaire normally adores, treats as a challenge. "I'm fantastic at dealing with jackasses."

She is, too, Grantaire knows this. Enjolras has probably emasculated more jerks than Grantaire has even met; watching her in action gives Grantaire the embarrassing urge to sigh gustily and fan herself. There's this stare she gets, and while it's a special thrill being in the crosshairs, there's a lot to be said for spectating...

The last traces of Grantaire's thin smile are gone, she's got nothing between her and Enjolras's benign implacability.

"Isn't it time for the meeting to start?" Grantaire asks instead of crawling under the table to hide.

And maybe Grantaire's childhood Catholicism wasn't wasted, or maybe the universe actually does cut her some slack sometimes, because Bahorel arrives before anyone has time to draw breath to continue this torture.

"I'm not late," Bahorel says, bullying Courfeyrac further into the booth so he's squished against Joly's side, and taking a seat himself. "And in case I am, may I remind you that I don't actually have to be here today?"

Courfeyrac clears his throat, Enjolras relinquishes her focus on Grantaire for more important things, and Grantaire's shoulders let go of a whisper of accumulated tension.

Everyone at the table has at least two years of monthly Amis de la PDT meetings under their belt, so once they actually turn to business, the momentum of '1) issue, 2) (brief) debate, 3) action item' takes over. It helps that they're nearing the end of term, so there are a lot of black-and-white details to iron out. How much they made from donations the month before, whether they'll be serving lunches until the last day of classes or the last day of exams (and Grantaire doesn't know where Joly thinks they'd be getting volunteers from during the exam period), when they're having the volunteer appreciation party and whether it should be dry or not.

Grantaire can feel her heart ticking back down to a walking pace. She'd volunteered as a first-year mostly so she'd be able to skip the line without feeling guilty, but the kitchens, and then the garden, and then their teensy closet of an office had all slowly become places she felt she had a claim to. A lot of the people who join the collective have ludicrous, lofty ambitions for the rest of their lives, but at the end of the day, the Amis de la PDT are about making sure that people eat. It's a goal Grantaire can fit in her hand.

There isn't a set end time, but Grantaire had opened the agenda Combeferre had sent around before she'd come, and she thinks she remembers what the final item had been. When Courfeyrac says, "So, we need to talk about who's going to take care of the garden committee this summer--we can't leave it all to Feuilly again," Grantaire nods thoughtfully and slips her wallet into her pocket.

A quiet request has Marius shuffling out of the booth so she can get by, and she studiously avoids looking over her shoulder on her way to the washroom. She'll volunteer for gardening by email, they'll all understand.

The door to the washroom swings shut, and ridiculously, she feels safer.

Both stalls are empty, so she goes for the one with the working lock. She pulls her pants down, she sits, she pees, she stares through the graffiti on the stall, and she tries not to think about being Enjolras's date for a night. Resting her hand in the sharp crook of her elbow--or no, at her waist. Watching Enjolras eviscerate Todd. Listening to her take apart Professor Hebert's pretentious demands of Grantaire's art.

The noise of the Musain floods in briefly, then cuts off as the washroom door opens and shuts. The sound tugs Grantaire's consciousness back to the grim reality of her situation: hiding on a toilet to make it easier to flee into the night, away from something she wants very much not to want anymore.

She sets her clothes in order, flushes, and provides herself a skeleton the next few minutes. She'll wash her hands, leave the Musain around the far side of the room, and be waiting for the next Metro within minutes. She'll run back home, tail between her legs.

The metal of the stall door is cold against her fingers as she pulls it open, and--oh.

"Where is it?" Enjolras asks, fixing her hair in the mirror with characteristic intensity. She'd arrived at the bar with her long black twists falling loose over her shoulders, but now they're getting corralled into the low ponytail she favours for cooking shifts. Business-like. "Your showcase."

Last spring had given Grantaire a lot of practice in handling shock, so she can keep her reaction to a sudden tension in her legs, _run_. "Give it a rest, angelface. This is a bad idea."

Enjolras finishes with her hair and leans against the door, cutting off Grantaire's exit with a long-legged, graceful slouch. "I know it's Saturday night, I just don't know where," she says, and she's looking right at Grantaire.

It's important to wash one's hands very carefully, even when they're cracked and irritated from dishwashing earlier. Twenty seconds of lather, scrub, scrub.

"Don't put yourself out for me--it's not like we're particularly close." Someone outside laughs, someone else is clapping their hands. Grantaire foregoes paper towel and wipes her hands off on her jeans.

"It’s no trouble, if that's what you're worried about. The show sounds interesting. I promise I'd be a good date," Enjolras says, and that is so far from the problem that Grantaire nearly screams.

She's has seen Enjolras on dates before, at parties, around campus. She goes on more than Grantaire would have guessed in the budding days of their acquaintance, when all she knew of Enjolras was her untouchable beauty and unrealistic expectations for baking soda proportions. (They'd gotten drunk together once, before Grantaire and ridiculous Facebook debates had begun to ruin that possibility; Grantaire still has the fading impression on her heart of _'It's what they want to take from us, so I'm grabbing it with both hands_.'). 

One shameful time, Grantaire had been in line at Metropolis just a few places behind Enjolras and her now-ex, Jamie. She'd watched them for a solid half hour, feet frozen in her boots, fingers curling in her pockets, watching Enjolras listen to Jamie describing… something, Grantaire couldn't tell what. Whatever it was had lit Jamie up blindingly bright, and Enjolras had reflected all of that enthusiasm, that passion straight back. She had looked like a _superb_ date, and it had been awful.

Grantaire makes an effort not to get to know these people, these lucky assholes who somehow manage to be drawn to Enjolras without trying to blow themselves up in the process. It's rude--she knows it's rude, Enjolras knows it's rude--but it's succeeded in limiting the fodder for Grantaire's own insecurities. 'Worthy of Enjolras' has remained a nebulous, unattainable quality, unquantifiable and therefore safely in the realm of fiction.

"It's not you I'm worried about," Grantaire says, and her heart taps out an unhappy tempo in her chest. "In case you haven't noticed, I can be a tad abrasive when it comes to you." She pastes on as much of a smirk as she can muster with Enjolras examining her all domineering. It's not very successful.

Enjolras shrugs. "And? It's an art show, we probably don't even have to talk to each other if you can't keep yourself in check."

"So what, you'll be a prop? I can point to you when fucking Todd shows up and say 'hey look at that, I'm fucking taken'?" _I'm worth someone's time_ is gulped down before it can hit Grantaire's tongue.

There's a slight lift in Enjolras's chin when Grantaire says 'Todd,' and if Grantaire didn't hate him so much she might feel bad for all-but-inviting ruination on him.

"We don't even have to talk that much if you don't want to," Enjolras says like she's presenting Grantaire with a special treat.

Grantaire can't look Enjolras in the eye as she offers that, and, looking away, catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She needs a haircut. She needs another drink. She needs to wipe that fucking look off her face, fragile and too, too, too close to wounded.

Mostly, she needs to get out of here.

"Sure Enjolras, you can be my date," she says. She makes a gesture to herself, a Vanna White. "All this, all yours, one night only." Grantaire's never been a very honest woman.

Of course Enjolras smiles, she's won the argument. She gets to _help_. "Good."

"Can I go now?" Grantaire asks, forcing the adolescent pissiness into her voice. "I have a hot date with a bottle of bourbon, and you're making it kinda hard to get to it." She tenses her calves against the waver in her voice at the very end.

"You still didn't tell me where the showcase is."

"... It's just at the Visual Arts building. We don't exactly merit an exotic location." The surrender is complete enough, now, that Enjolras can step aside with a satisfied roll of her hips. Grantaire's free to go. "Wear something--" _nice_ , she was going to say, but she's not that self-sabotaging. "Clothes. Wear clothes."

Enjolras frowns and Grantaire pushes past her and towards the sympathetic embrace of a cool spring night and a smokey mug of bourbon. She'll debrief Musichetta and Joly later, if they request it. Right now, she needs to wallow, and she's always done that best on her own. 

\--

The rest of the week trickles by. Grantaire's showing two pieces on Saturday, but counter to the expectations of herself, her friends, and everyone who has ever shared a studio with her, had done the bulk of her work on both of them earlier in the term. (She dulls her own shock with the awareness that she had at least had tremendously unhealthy work habits through the semester, despite her light courseload. Her relative preparedness comes from spending two frigid February days locked in the studio, hiding under her desk with a sketchbook and struggling to exorcise the anxieties of last spring, from replacing sleep with caffeine pills all through Easter weekend, from neglecting immediate deadlines in service to paranoia about her second final showcase.)

As a consequence, she's one of the only qualified coordinators who isn't crushed under schoolwork this close to the end of the semester. She spends every morning in the kitchen, bossing around the few volunteers who still have free hours to devote to fruit salads and veggie pies. As per PDT policy, she's not on the hook for coordinating clean-up, but ends up sticking around to chat with Jehan (Wednesday), and Eponine (Friday).

Enjolras had had clean-up Thursday, and Grantaire had used a darling first-year volunteer as a body shield to cover her escape.

Jehan hadn't had any advice. He'd wrapped her in a hug on her way out, though, and Grantaire had closed her eyes and felt his arms holding her together like kitchen twine around a brittle bundle of herbs.

"You look grumpy today," is Eponine's opening greeting. 

"Thanks," Grantaire says. "Can you get the grille thing?"

Eponine slides it down, closing off the kitchen from the service area in a no-nonsense gesture.

There's a routine, a sort of choreography that Grantaire's been doing with Eponine longer than almost any other member of the Amis. They don't have to think as they clean, muscles just firing dumbly to work through a checklist long since memorized. Grantaire has maybe a month of this particular closeness left, assuming she finally graduates.

"I'm glad you're being forced to be in the same place as Enjolras. It'll do both of you some good."

"You're a terrible person and should feel terrible." It's too easy to dodge the dishrag Eponine throws at her--that's sympathy if Grantaire ever saw it.

The only volunteer still there is Florence, who's been helping with the PDT since long before any of the present coordinators had appeared on the scene. She's supremely unbothered by any of their antics and Grantaire takes some obscure comfort in that. The sun will set, students will graduate, but Florence will always be there to deal with the compost and (amazingly) be willing to clean the walk-in fridge.

"I'm wonderful, and you're lucky to know me," Eponine declares. She's watching a stock pot slowly fill with water, and Grantaire wishes she could see inside her head and out of her eyes, determine whether the swirling fragments of food are beautiful to her, or stomach-turning.

Grantaire wipes off the counters, starting at the window and working her way towards Eponine. "Are you looking forward to seeing the kids this weekend?"

"Obviously," Eponine says, a veneer of cool tacked sloppily over an earnest smile. "Gavroche is graduating from CÉGEP next month, by the way, and if you don't come by to tell him congrats for surviving I think he'll probably cry."

Grantaire scrubs at some dried tomato paste and wills her mind to skip over _surviving_ , over _first CÉGEP to join the strike_ , over _cry_. "I'll see if I can pencil that in."

"They both want to come to see your stuff on Sunday, too. We might not have time, I don't know."

"Well, no big deal if you can't make it," Grantaire says lightly. "I think the three of you merit a private exhibition if you all still want to see it later."

Eponine's up to her elbows in soapy water now, and Grantaire can't see her face to divine her motives when she asks, "Are you ready for tomorrow, then?"

Grantaire turns her attention to cleaning the stovetop. "Hah. ' _Ready for tomorrow_ ,' she asks, as if there's any preparing for apocalypse. Would you ask a resident of Pompeii if they were _ready_ for the eruption, or an unfortunate West Coaster if they were _ready_ for the Big One? No," she says, because the longer she talks the less she has to say. "I'd hope you would not. But if you were to ask, and provide for them a venue to answer, no doubt they'd give you similar responses. Some of them have had good lives, I'm sure; made friends, kissed some beautiful people, dined well, heard some heart-wrenching music. They're armoured in iron made from those moments, and might tell you 'sure, bring it.' Not everyone is so lucky, though, and for every person who goes to their grave satisfied, there are--" 

The pacing of her patter is thrown off when Florence emerges from the walk-in with a bucket bound for the compost heap. Florence is to be thanked, no, the girls are to be thanked. They'll take the scraps from the sink out when they're done. They hope Florence has a good weekend, she hopes the same for them. Everyone is thankful. They'll all see each other next week.

Grantaire is happy to give up her rhetorical unsatisfied souls to the embrace of the quotidien.

"So you're not ready," Eponine concludes after Florence has left.

Grantaire's lips press together, and she rinses the cloth out so that it's clean of detritus and the unspoken _no_ that Eponine had replied to.

"I dreaded seeing Cosette," Eponine offers. "And that turned out well."

They're still friends, after a whirlwind relationship and an amicable crumbling of romance.

"She liked you, though," Grantaire says. There are more words bubbling through her sternum, but they'd be pointless. The contrast between Eponine's prickly, unfounded nerves and Grantaire's thoroughly sensible nausea has been laid out brutally enough.

"That's fair," Eponine says, and it's another sort of kindness from her.

\--

There's nothing much you can do to exhibit a book. The others from the illustration focus all seem to have realised this--they had poured out their energies in completing their projects, nobody had had any spark left over to get creative about displaying them. This means it's quiet when Grantaire steps, inexplicably hesitant, into the room.

Compared to the sleek overhaul that the rest of the Visual Arts building had undergone, the space reserved for illustration is plain, verging on shoddy. Grantaire runs her hand over the top of the carrell nearest the door and wishes that she'd thought to prepare a diorama or something. She could've made a habitat for her book, given it some support, a little ecosystem to play in. Instead, it's lying flat and exposed on a carrell near an air vent, accompanied only by a sad box of business cards.

"Sorry," Grantaire mutters. She brushes the cover of her book, but doesn't open it. Maybe if she were to open it now, the pages would be empty--leaving it shut is safer. She slides a few cards out of the box, fans them out on the table in a half-hearted arc around their kin. "I'm--I didn't know what to do."

No one else is in the room, too busy running around outside, hanging photos, cursing at extension cords, touching up paint on the walls that need it. She can't hear them over the sudden pounding of her heart, the terrified whine of her thoughts.

The picture book is 32 pages long. It's supposed to be her primary exhibition piece.

She doesn't want to think about it.

Grantaire mumbles a goodbye and goes to mess with her other work.

\--

The top of the tapestry is level. Grantaire knows this because the virtual bubble in her phone's level app is floating compliantly between the two vertical lines. When she hops down to check the bottom again, however, the bubble refuses to toe either of the lines, veering defiantly off to the left and betraying the unevenness of the linen's hang.

"Fuck," she mutters.

"You see what I mean?" J-F holds his hands out, palms up, unhelpful. "It must've stretched."

Grantaire says, "It's not a big deal," and wills herself to believe it. Rationally, it's fine. _Be rational, Grantaire._

"It's a pity," says J-F. "It's subtle, so maybe no one will notice. And if they do, you can tell them it's part of the art?"

Part of the art that the square has pulled, sagged, twisted off-centre and off-message? She doesn't know if she could sell it--her hands are more eloquent than her mouth, and they've already done all the damage they can. Besides (she pushes the step-ladder further out of the way and steps back to get a better look at the whole) it really isn't noticeable. Does that make it more apt, or less? 

"Sure," she agrees belatedly, and then realises J-F's already left to help someone else with their display.

Her phone makes a plea for her attention and she's happy to give it, so long as it allows her to avoid looking at the term project splayed against the wall. Courfeyrac wants to know if Bossuet had meant to bring the jacket he'd left at the cafe this morning, the one with his phone in the pocket.

 _Good save, bring it by,_ Grantaire tells him. _And he'll probably want food, too, if you feel like picking up a sandwich._

She reflexively checks her other notifications, opens the NHL app, closes it before it has time to do more than blacken her screen and consider loading. There's no game tonight, she knows. She won't have the familiar thrum of playoff nerves to split her attention from her own work (disaster) and provide the safe anxiety that is the wheelhouse of all sports fans.

(Grantaire had grown up watching hockey with her father, elbow-to-elbow on a crowded couch covered in the bleu, blanc, rouge. She keeps standings and statistics to roll across her mind like rosary beads, even now. Her father had seen them play once, the best roster of all time: Ken Dryden in net with Michel Larocque his backup; Captain Serge Savard and the rest of the Big Three on defense; Guy Lafleur, Jacques Lemaire, Steve Shutt--with an incredible 60 goals that season--up front. Dropped only 8 games of 80, only 1 on home ice… Her father shook Mario Tremblay's hand one time, but had nothing for him to sign. She hadn't been alive to see any of this herself, but the rhythm of the words beats easily across her mind.)

Still hiding from her own piece. Grantaire takes a moment to be disgusted with herself, then a split-second to be brave. Her phone gets tucked into her jeans and her regard swings back up to the tapestry in front of her. She forces her eyes not to get absorbed by details and square centimetres, but take in the whole, the twisting march from top to bottom, through November and into spring, and past it. The red might've been too much, she could've made the SPVM riot gear more matte. It's not subtle. It's done. She feels like it enters her lungs when she takes a deep pull of air.

 _This won't hurt a bit_ , she thinks forcefully. Breathe in, and out. _Inspire, expire_.

Her profs will see it tonight, and Enjolras. Everyone else will see it at the public show tomorrow. And then it'll be done.

"Ugh, strike stuff?" comes Todd's assessment from over her shoulder. "I voted against that, you know."

"I know," Grantaire says, stifling her flinch. "And yet, the strike forged on regardless! Amazing." She fights against the urge to tear down her tapestry and smother Todd with it, or maybe just to throw herself in front of it like a bodyguard taking a bullet, a bullet--her mind stutters.

Even with her belly and generous proportions, her body wouldn't be enough to cover more than a third of the tapestry, so she contents herself with shifting her weight to her heels and giving Todd her smarmiest grin. "And where's your requisite phallic sculpture? I didn't notice it on the way in. 'Course, I'd expect it to be tiny, given the man behind the clay." 

She reaches for a "feet of clay" joke (peens of clay?) but her thoughts don't solidify until after Todd flips her off with a laconic twitch of his wrist and says, "You just wish you had one, mox buncher."

"Go fuck yourself," she says.

\--

The Café Musain believes in:

1\. affordable student meals  
2\. the fair treatment of employees  
3\. the future of the co-op café/bar  
4\. the viability of Québec as a sovereign nation  
5\. bean sprouts  
6\. root vegetables  
7\. rye...  
a. bread (nutty, crumbly, the colour of coffee)  
b. whisky (for 3.95$ if you're there in time for the 5 à 7)

Courfeyrac, when he shows up a half hour later, has brought sandwiches for Bossuet and Grantaire that display the Musain's full abilities and passions with regard to items 5, 6, and 7a.

He finds Grantaire first, stepping in and holding up the top of Josephine's poster right as Grantaire's precarious tippy-toe stretch wobbles and threatens to steal her balance from her. 

"Trade you?" he offers, and immediately removes the choice he'd given voice to by one-handedly draping Bossuet's coat over Grantaire's shoulder and pushing a promising brown bag against her arms.

Grantaire thanks him with a huff of annoyance and a smile directed downwards to tumble into the lunch bag.

"Thank god," Josephine says, and darts left and right to mark the edges of her poster with a nub of pencil. "No offense, Grantaire, but you were making me a bit nervous." She illustrates her point with a sped-up side-to-side shake to show Grantaire destabilizing, shaking, fucking it all up. Maybe she's reading a little too much into it.

"She's got friends in high places," Courfeyrac says with a grin. 

Grantaire shifts Bossuet's jacket to a more comfortable drape over both her shoulders. She imagines for a flash that wrapping herself in Bossuet's clothes will cover up her Grantaireness, that she can shrug out of her skin and into his with a slip of fabric. "Friends who get high, I'll grant you. Or maybe friends high, high up in ivory towers--aren't you supposed to be working on something? Papers? Theses? Some other heartbreaking work of staggering genius?" The jacket smells like weed and chocolate; Grantaire immediately craves both.

Josephine snorts and Courfeyrac shrugs eloquently. "I needed a break. Hey, can I put this down?" He taps his fingers against Josephine's poster, a bold, peacock blue.

"Yeah, I'll be fine from here," Josephine says. "Just needed to get the spacing right, you know?"

"Oh, totally," Courfeyrac agrees. He shoots Grantaire a sly glance, _I don't know at all_ , and Josephine laughs at herself.

\--

"I have to confess, I'm partly here on reconnaissance," Courfeyrac tells Grantaire as she weaves them a path between stressed out third-years. "Enjolras wanted to know what to expect tonight." They pass through the rest of the app section to the repurposed classroom where the rest of the print media crowd have set up their stuff.

Bossuet's phone bumps against Grantaire's hip. It's probably empty of the messages that have been marching into Grantaire's inbox, one by one, clearly scheduled: _What time should I arrive?_ and _Do I owe you for a ticket?_ and _I'm going to really get to know you now, and once I know you I can hate you like you've known I would for years. The hours of my indifference are running out._

Maybe not that last one.

"Did she?" Grantaire asks. The flippant flick of her eyebrows won't fool Courfeyrac, but she doesn't particularly care to fool him anyways. The cat that is Grantaire's doomed obsession with Enjolras has been out of its bag for years, now, has prowled around the Amis de la PDT kitchens and taken to begging for scraps. "What am I asking, of course she did--the boss doesn't go into a battlefield uninformed or unawares anymore, did you hear?"

She doesn't glance back to see if Courfeyrac winces at the reminder of last spring. Grantaire had mostly slid it in there to needle herself, anyways.

"She'll be here at 7," says Courfeyrac. "And heads up, I think she's going to wear that red dress."

Grantaire holds the door open for him, gestures feebly for him to go ahead while she collects herself. _That red dress_ , he says, as casually as if _that red dress_ hadn't single-handedly silenced Grantaire for an entire pub night a couple years ago. Grantaire had spent heart-pounding hours convinced that _'I'm afraid I'm over-dressed'_ would be the last words she'd ever hear and fully process. She forgets why they'd been getting together that night, or who else had been there, or what the hell Enjolras had been doing that she could possibly have missed Grantaire's gaping.

"Bossuet!" Courfeyrac proclaims. This earns him a few swivelled, curious faces, but in general the audience is too sleep-deprived to yield a satisfactory reaction. "I come bearing sustenance and tragically-forgotten electronics!"

Bossuet emerges from a knot of people slumped against the window and walks, loose-limbed, to greet him. "Courfeyrac, you are an angel, a saint, a--hold up, where are the promised goods? Did you _deceive_ me?"

"Saint-de-Courfeyrac deemed me fit to deliver them," Grantaire says as she catches up, sweeping the jacket off her shoulders with a flourish. She presents the sandwiches and coat together to Bossuet, stretches her arms out straight and bows slightly, unable to muster more pomp or circumstance with Courfeyrac's reminder of her looming fate fresh in her mind. "Much to my honour, of course."

The sandwiches are welcome, as is the phone; Bossuet dives into both with equal relish (literal for the former, figurative for the second). He surfaces briefly to give Courfeyrac a preview of his final project, a sweet, fluid typeface displayed as snatches of magnetic poetry. 

_j'ai quand même idée farouche_  
_de t'aimer pour ta pureté_  
_de t'aimer pour une tendresse que je n'ai pas connue_ ,2 and

 _tu te lèves, tu es l'aube dans mes bras_ ,3 and

 _ô mains_  
_ô poings_  
_des cogneurs de folles tendresses_ ,4 and

 _ô fou feu froid de la neige_ ,5 and

 _je sais que tout mon amour_  
_sera retourné comme un jardin détruit._ 6

\--

Grantaire steers the three of them past a white divider in the hall to the stained armchairs hidden behind it, blocked off for the purposes of the show that night. 

Bossuet's nearly done his sandwich by the time they arrive, but Grantaire can't stop the nervous flow of words out of her mouth long enough to take a bite.

"It shouldn't be obvious, though," she continues, and Bossuet and Courfeyrac both know her well enough to expect this, don't they? Only last year's show, her bones hadn't been this itchy, her heart this active; she'd been resigned to failure, which had been far easier than what her head's doing now. "Nobody's going to be crouching down to check the hang at the bottom." She runs her tongue over her teeth, imagines Gros tilting his head, narrowing his eyes. "What if they do notice, what should I say?"

Bossuet waves his hand vaguely, scattering a couple crumbs and immediately brushing them up. "No one's going to notice. And I bet you'd come up with something."

"Oh you bet, do you?" Grantaire grumbles. "Well, I don't feel lucky, punk, not with you rolling the dice. I should have something ready just in case, but I feel like I can't rely on being smiled upon by the patron saint of talking-out-of-one's-ass. Didn't work out for me great last year, anyway."

"This isn't last year," Courfeyrac says, and coming from almost anyone else, the softness around his eyes would give Grantaire hives. From him, it just makes her roll her foot in a little circle.

She listens to the crackle of her ankle instead of replying.

She tries to imagine what's happening under her skin to make that noise, instead of thinking about her other project. (If they hate the tapestry, that's fine, she halfway hates it too. If they hate her book, though--) Nitrogen bubbles. That's what the cracking noise is, that's all it is.

"I'll say," Bossuet says. He gently nudges Grantaire's right hand, with its clammy grasp on her sandwich, upwards. "Last year, I was a sweet, innocent second-year, not a thought in my mind except rebellion and the downfall of tuition hikes. This year, to contrast, I've spent the last two weeks recreating a whole term's worth of serif-tinkering and prayers to FontLab. The experience has aged me beyond my youthful years."

He pushes his thumb into the meat of his palm, massages an ache. Grantaire feels a sympathy twinge in her own hand, the echo of hours clutching a pen, a needle, a paintbrush. She should be grateful; traditional illustration might not be setting her up for employment as well as print or design would've, but at least she's never had a sketchbook swallow down months of work in a callous blink of code.

"I didn't get the story," Courfeyrac says, and raises his eyebrows at Grantaire--no, at the sandwich he'd brought for her, which she still hasn't put to her lips. She pulls a face, pictures herself as a gargoyle perched on the edge of an armchair, but obediently takes a first bite. "All Joly said on Tuesday was something about Dropbox and how nobody should expect to see you until after this weekend."

Bossuet groans and launches into The Saga of the Files That Were Until Suddenly They Weren't (2013 edition). It's a lot less harrowing having already seen the proof that his work had made it out, every last curve and angle snatched from the snapping jaws of tonight's deadline. 

Grantaire lets her ears fill up with the familiar cadences of Bossuet recounting a disaster averted, Courfeyrac gasping and exclaiming where appropriate. Bossuet's accompanying gestures are graceful and beautifully illustrative, and if she hadn't used up her creativity for the time being, she'd be imagining how to set the scene to paper. As she's currently an artistic husk, she eats her sandwich. 

It's good. Cooking for the Amis de la PDT means eating an improbable amount of vegan stews, soups, and roasted vegetables, so this sandwich (complete with a sinful stratum of smoked meat) feels like a revelation. After four years of the same rotation of recipes, Grantaire doesn't think she can even taste some of the PDT food anymore. Fully half of her body is probably made of their olive oil cake, for instance--being able to taste it would be like being able to taste her own mouth.

"And by the time the italics and bolds were ready to go, I had to give up on Plan A," Bossuet tells Courfeyrac. "I was hoping to do laser-cut wood, you know, and just a simple _Quick brown fox_ and _Le cœur déçu mais l'âme plutôt naïve_ 7 to show the typeface, but it was too late for the wood shop to process the order." Courfeyrac makes a dismayed face, and Bossuet folds his legs up into the chair. "The magnetic poetry was mostly Musichetta's idea. If I pass, it's all thanks to her."

"You more than deserve to pass," Courfeyrac assures him, and Grantaire nods along.

"Did you see what the guy across from you had done?" she asks. "If he can be proud to display his Helvetica-using, shoddily-bound artbook of Montréal's top ten tourist traps, then there's no way for you to feel bad about yours, it's just impossible."

"And you don't think using Miron is too…" Grantaire watches Bossuet physically reach for a word, clasp it between his long fingers, let it go with a speaking shrug. "Excessive?" 

Courfeyrac is in a better position to ease his worries here; Grantaire had participated in picking the poem, so she's barely less biased than Bossuet. If it were her, she wouldn't listen to herself. She particularly wouldn't listen to herself if it meant not hearing Courfeyrac's pretty words--he's a better speaker than her, especially when it comes to lifting people up.

\--

The show officially starts at seven, Grantaire reminds herself, toes wriggling in her shoes. Her bus is only a few blocks away from campus when the clock on her phone blithely slides to 18:57 (because her Anglo school may be trying to bully her into using the 12-hour clock, but she'll be damned if she gives in). She'll be on time, technically.

She'd had more than enough time to go home, change clothes, and return, and that was probably what had done her in. With ten minutes before food service starts and a thousand things to accomplish, Grantaire can fly through them all, but give her five hours to do three simple tasks and she'll disappoint every time.

Reflexively, she tries to account for the hours lost, as if tallying up where she'd been and what she'd been doing can justify the sweat in the small of her back right now, the hard sell she'll have to do if Enjolras beats her to the show. It couldn't've been later than two when she had dropped Bossuet off for him to power-nap, so she must've been home by half past. If pressed, Grantaire can maybe account for an hour of texting Eponine and fussing with clothes--she'd needed to polish her shoes, her blazer had been wrinkled--but other than that… She hadn't even eaten, she has no excuses.

"I-have-no-excuse," is her opening line, falling out of her mouth as single shameful word as she trots up to where Enjolras is waiting just beside the exhibition doors.

Enjolras, having touched a careful hand to her hair as she'd watched Grantaire arriving, Enjolras, fulfilling Courfeyrac's dreadful prophecy of that red dress, Enjolras, _Enjolras_ kisses her cheeks. Her braids smell like coconut. "You're practically punctual," she allows with an indulgent tilt of her head. "I know you made an effort."

 _I'd be a good date_ , she'd said, and somehow neglected to mention that she'd be doing her level best to give Grantaire a heart attack. She's standing close enough that Grantaire needs to keep her head at an angle if she wants to meet her eyes, which are, oh god, giving Grantaire's outfit the semblance of an appreciative glance.

A shiver fights to run through Grantaire--she wrestles it into a shrug. "Not like that's good enough in the real world," she retorts, and no, she's going about this all wrong.

"None of that," Enjolras says, and _that_ throws Grantaire. Her vowels sound warm. "You're here to defend your work, right? Let's go into this with a bit of fight."

 _Let's_ , as if they're naturally a team. Her hand is still on Grantaire's upper arm, which she gives a bracing squeeze.

"Well," Grantaire says. "You certainly came… in character."

Enjolras's thick, perfect brows raise slightly. "I'm your date for the evening," she says just on the lower edge of a normal speaking tone. A whisper would be too obvious, Grantaire supposes. "And we're well within sight of half your classmates. You need to give me something, too."

The weight of the things Grantaire would give Enjolras overwhelms her for a moment. Another moment is lost to wondering if she should ask permission to lay a hand on Enjolras's waist, tucked under the splay of her long black scarf. _Better not_ , and another moment ticks by.

Grantaire assembles a smile (spread lips, corners up, eyes crinkled) and plucks at Enjolras's scarf, settles it more evenly across her shoulders. "You must be freezing. Let's get some wine to warm you up."

They walk in five minutes late, together.

\--

"Welcome," Professor Gagnon says, after everyone has collected tiny wine glasses and gotten two sentences into an awkward conversation with the person beside them. "To your final show as Concordia studio artists!"

Grantaire feels her face do something, because hell, it's funny. This is the same speech she'd heard last year, at her _last_ final show as a Concordia studio artist. Enjolras glances at her and smiles, too, like they're in on a private joke together. 

Miraculously, Grantaire is able to take a short break from being hopelessly in love with Enjolras to feel hopelessly furious at her. She breathes through the smog of memories from last spring. Her lungs expand against that time she'd dropped three litres of milk (purchased on Joly's orders) in the grocery store. Her ribcage freezes around retweeting endless pictures of SPVM on horseback, of peering at tiny, blurry photos and praying not to recognize. She forces a stream of air out, through not being able to work, not being able to sleep, worrying, worrying, worrying.

Everyone's figuring out how to applaud while holding wine glasses, and Professor Gagnon melts into the crowd.

"Did you listen to a word she said?" Enjolras asks, because even now she can't help herself. Grantaire silently commends her on her tone, at least; it says _I know you well_ , and _I'm fond of this quirk_. She never would've taken Enjolras for such a good liar.

"Nope," Grantaire aims for insouciance, flutters her meager eyelashes for good measure. "You hear this speech once, you've heard it a thousand times."

This gets a shrug, and even Enjolras's _clavicles_ are perfect. Grantaire despairs. Enjolras is unselfconscious when she admits, "I've never been to an art show like this before. Are we meant to mingle?"

Grantaire meets her shrug with another, shorter, sharper. "You can, if you like." A glance around the room reveals nothing Grantaire can distract Enjolras with, no exes (Enjolras always stays on good terms with them), no artwork that would be up her alley. The first hall is devoted to intermedia, all screens and apps and boastful, hopeful posters. "I have to go loiter by my--" she steps over the traditional self-deprecation, not wanting a fight "--pieces and pray no professors come by to grill me." Enjolras might like watching that, it occurs to her. Grantaire backed into a corner, forced to act assured and sincere, forced to _give a shit, for once in your life_. "The big one's a couple rooms over."

"Let's go," Enjolras says, like it's that simple.

"We're stopping for wine on the way," Grantaire says.

Enjolras winces. Good, that means Grantaire can claim her glass with impunity.

\--

When she becomes a weird cat lady living in a shack in the Laurentians, Grantaire will name each and every one of her dozen inevitable cats after Bossuet, all because as they'd wended their way past his display, he'd looped his arm through Enjolras's and made a plaintive noise. He was dateless! And surely Grantaire could spare Enjolras for just a minute, he'd love to show his typeface to a pair of friendly eyes before the professors descended. Never mind that he'd gone through his spiel a hundred times in the last couple days (the first dozen runs had been nervous, the next dozen over-confident, followed by tens of bored, worn-out litanies of features, but settling beautifully in the final iterations. He was passionate, he was secure, he was going to knock this out of the park.).

"I'll hold this," Grantaire had offered, then stolen Enjolras's wine and stolen away into the crowd.

The wine glasses for these events are shamefully small, and both her own and Enjolras's are empty by the time she arrives at her appointed slice of hall. Isn't it good that there's a table near her tapestry? And isn't it good that someone else has already abandoned their own empty glass there, and she can perch hers beside it? They form a sweet little trio, stray drops of red, white, red in the divots at the bottom of each glass.

Grantaire scrubs her hands through her hair. She hadn't had time for the haircut after all, and had been too vain to turn to the mercies of Joly's kitchen scissors.

"Tell me about this," Gros says, and she jumps.

"What?" Grantaire asks, the sound already hanging in the air while her brain screeches that it's obvious what he means, the tapestry is _massive_ , she's an _idiot_. She bares her teeth in a grin, tries to save it. "Haha, well, as you can see," and god, why had she finished her drinks on the way there? She tucks her empty hands into her pockets and presses the pads of her fingers into her thighs. Maybe she'll leave ten anxious fingerprints in her own skin. Maybe they'll stay forever, scattered through her tattoos. "I wanted to tell a story. Considering the story I wanted to tell, the only appropriate choice of shape for the panel was the square," and she's off.

She's sure she must've practiced this--her studio class had met last week to rehearse this exact performance, to play with wording and organization of thoughts and _prepare_. Grantaire's body had been there, as had some version of her brain. Now, though, she feels like--like a ghost, maybe. The Grantaire who had known what was going on is dead, leaving the present Grantaire to be thrust into her unfinished business, unprepared.

It's like looking at the work of a stranger, now.

"You call it a tapestry, but it's plainly not woven--why?" _Because I saw the Bayeux Tapestry when I was young and impressionable, because the strike felt like a war. Because Nilima Sheikh painted tapestries, because I didn't know how to weave._

"Why the student strike?" _Because I couldn't think of anything else, and I mean that literally, because I could not think of a single thing other than the strike for months on end. Because I understood why_ we _voted yes, but I didn't understand why_ I _voted yes. Because all I could offer was to put everything on record._

"What were the biggest challenges you came across?" _Mixed-media is a nightmare. Finding something to hold the linen taut without warping it: nightmare; Getting the weight of the paint just so: nightmare; Attempting embroidery: nightmare. Then there was the composition: another nightmare. Combing through my old Twitter for an accurate sequence of events, for images, for something more concrete than memory: … not actually a nightmare, since I didn't sleep a whole lot at that stage of the project._

"Who can you envision buying a piece like this?"

The word _nobody_ is poised fully-formed on her tongue when her mental filter stutters back to life, just in time to censor that terrible idea. Unfortunately, it didn't bring any suggestions of less terrible ideas, so she's left making uncomfortable eye contact with Gros.

"There you are," Enjolras says, her arm curling suddenly, gently, around Grantaire's shoulders. Grantaire starts, turns her head to be blindsided by Enjolras's polite smile. "Sorry to interrupt, Professor."

Gros isn't impressed, and Grantaire isn't convinced she'll be able to articulate a full sentence with Enjolras warm against her side, but nonetheless she's pathetically grateful for the respite.

"Buyers?" Gros reminds her.

A year ago, she'd been infuriating him with a cobbled-together piece of bullshit trying to masquerade as experimental art. The arch of his eyebrow now is not worse than that, it isn't.

Grantaire swallows. "It was a cathartic project," she settles on. "I wasn't thinking of selling it."

Gros snorts, and Enjolras's arm tightens around Grantaire, gathers her a centimetre closer. 

"At least you're honest," Gros says. "You're right, though; anyone who agrees with its message isn't going to be able to afford it, and anyone who _could_ afford it would never want you to have their money. Congratulations, you've made your last piece of totally self-indulgent art." He reaches out to ruffle Grantaire's hair, the way he'd done before she'd started truly disappointing him.

The gesture is as much of a shock as Enjolras's appearance a few moments ago had been. Her guard down, Grantaire huffs out a breath, smiles like she'd smiled as a child--nose wrinkled, her top lip pulled up to unattractively expose her gums. The expression flickers quickly off her face. Maybe Enjolras doesn't see.

"Thanks," she tells Gros, tries to cram the word full of more meaning than its scant single syllable can support.

Gros rolls his eyes. "You know how I like to hear myself speak--you're enough like me when you get rolling that it's nearly as good. Not quite, obviously, but close." Enjolras mutters what might be _egoist_ , but Grantaire chooses to ignore it. "So why are you skulking by your secondary piece? Are you hoping your red flag here would keep the bulls away from the actual illustration project you're here to present?"

Grantaire shouldn't be surprised that Gros had kept track of her, despite her engineered avoidance of him this year--the first three years of her degree, she'd practically shoved herself in his face, arguing through advising sessions, ignoring assignment specifications to turn in what Bahorel had deemed 'fuck you paintings,' sprawling, emotional, guideline-flouting pieces that generally set her back a few days' sleep. Gros had rubbed her the wrong way, but he'd made her _want_ to do art in a way that she hadn't thought professors could do, even if most of her passion had sprung from the desire to piss him off.

Exactly a year ago, she'd realised that he had a point past which he couldn't be amicably pushed. Exactly a year ago, she'd learned just how little a reputation as "bored, brilliant, rebellious" was worth.

Maybe he'd just seen the label beside her tapestry that indicated the artist was also exhibiting a work on the second floor.

"This room's got better ambiance," Grantaire says. She feels her treacherous body leaning into Enjolras, but makes no effort to stand straight. "I wouldn't like to drag the exquisite Enjolras into that dreary shoebox, nor should I abandon her to the merciless embrace of the ragtag studio art crew, this wretched hive of paint and pottery."

Enjolras takes her arm off Grantaire's shoulders, which miss it immediately. She catches Grantaire's gaze from far, far too close. Grantaire steps away--from there, Enjolras's eyes are a non-threatening brown (or not quite, but she can pretend).

Grantaire hadn't realised how quiet Enjolras had been just now until she breaks her silence, saying, "If you need to talk about your other art with your professor, I can entertain myself here."

Grantaire flashes through the calculus of agony, derives her limits as Enjolras approaches intimacy. Enjolras examining the tapestry, drawing her own secret conclusions… that's insupportable. But Enjolras trailing her to the picture book would be----worse, somehow. Ideally, Grantaire would escort Enjolras somewhere far from here, sit her down and strap her in. She could have a book, and food, and anything in heaven and earth so long as she didn't wander through Grantaire's life unsupervised.

She's being watched by both Enjolras and Gros, now.

"Grantaire?" Enjolras asks, then continues in French, as if Gros can't understand, as if she has any idea what this slight nod to privacy will do to Grantaire's heart, "If you want company…"

"No," Grantaire says, followed immediately by, "Yes." How clear! How helpful! "Enjolras, please enjoy the splendours that Studio Arts has to offer; if anyone tries to sell you something, tell me how much they were asking for because it'll probably be hilarious. Professor, lead the way. Let's get this over with."

\--

"How long has _that_ been going on?" Gros asks before they're even out of earshot of Enjolras.

Grantaire swerves to grab two more glasses of wine in lieu of answering.

\--

Gros is decent about the picture book, despite his delusion that Grantaire had been aiming something experimental and genre-bending. "It's just a picture book," she repeats each time he calls it a graphic novel. "Like for kids."

"Whatever you say," Gros says. "But if you know what's good for you, you'll try to get one of the Drawn and Quarterly guys over here, they'll eat this stuff up."

"More commercially viable than the tapestry, then?" Grantaire asks, only half sardonically. She's too myopic about both the projects to have accuracy in assessing their worth, but she'd've guessed that a self-indulgent book written by a boy recovering from a minor concussion and a girl half out of her mind with sleep deprivation would rank on the bottom of pretty much any list.

"Ma grande, I can hardly think of anything _less_ commercially viable than that thing." He lets the book fall open in his hands again and skims the contents. He idly rubs a page between two fingers, feeling its weight.

He doesn't waste his time on things he's not interested in--it's part of what makes him an objectively bad teacher. It's rare that comes back for a second look at a piece.

Grantaire takes his interest as a parting gift, but wants the warmth in her veins to be only wine and not gratitude.

\--

There are a few other professors she's supposed to find, or who are supposed to find her. Could be they'll come upstairs, she hopes. Could be she won't have to go back down.

She lingers in the illustrators' territory until she's obviously looked at all of the portfolios and projects on display, and made uncomfortable small-talk with everyone she couldn't avoid. To satisfy Gros's determined throat-clearing and head-nodding, she even talks with a couple publishing house reps. They're generally positive and indulgent, because who would come to a student showcase with a combative attitude? Grantaire takes their veneers of interest and their platitudes and their business cards, but there are only so many who are interested in her. After a half hour or so, she is forced to concede defeat. She doesn't do it gracefully, trudging down the back staircase and grumbling half-formed annoyances.

The benefit of this route is that it lets out near the washrooms, allowing Grantaire to slip into the main hall in the footsteps of a pair of men she distantly recognizes from a photography course.

Enjolras is immediately evident on the other side of the room, apparently interrogating some unfortunate hipster about why the hell they'd created (Grantaire squints) a polaroid series of dozens and dozens of garbage cans? She's glad Enjolras is on the case.

Grantaire drags her eyes away from Enjolras in order to locate a strategic professor or two, and makes the mistake of trying to walk while she searches.

"Woah, watch your step!" exclaims the guy whose foot she's just trod on.

"Excuse me," she says on autopilot, hands half-raising to brace--oh.

"I don't know that I will," says Todd. He's wearing the exact same thing as he'd been wearing earlier, down to the bleach-stains on his polo shirt, because he has no concept of, of formality, or respect. Some people have been working all fucking year for--. "Just couldn't keep yourself off me, eh?"

Grantaire huffs in exasperation. "Hardly," is the best she can manage at first. Words should be easier than this, but there's some missing circuitry in her head right now, or just plain old interference from nerves, and anger, and Enjolras being here. And with that realisation, the obstruction in her thoughts clears up. "As a matter of fact," she says, slamming out the final consonant cluster with a crack. "I'm here with my date. So fuck you."

"Sure you are," Todd laughs. 

Four years ago, the outright dismissal might've been enough to make Grantaire less sure (though it would still have made her furious). These days, it perversely makes some steel trickle down her spine. "Over there," she says with a sharp nod. "In the red dress."

And as Todd looks, then double-takes, _there_ it is. Grantaire was wondering when the self-doubt would kick in, but--who is she to be using Enjolras as a weapon like this? She's a fucking person, Grantaire is being her worst self right now, reducing her to an armpiece. … An armpiece who has apparently noticed Todd gaping, and is impolitely excusing herself from the trash photographer, oh god.

"No way," Todd says. He gives Grantaire some sort of look, she can't tell if it's impressed or disgusted or what, and she doesn't particularly care. "How much did that set you back?"

"Are you kidding me?" Grantaire hisses. "Don't fucking talk about people like that."

Enjolras arrives in time to hear Todd say, "It's the logical conclusion, don't be a hater."

She gives Grantaire a quizzical look, stepping in smoothly to insinuate herself at Grantaire's side like that's where she belongs. "What's going on, Grantaire? How did it go with your professor?"

"Fine," Grantaire says, but Todd's voice is louder.

"No, no, this is perfect." He's sporting a grin that spells bad news in every flashing white tooth. Grantaire imagines blood capping the sharp enamel. "Settle something for us?" 

"Don't drag her into your idiocy," Grantaire says, because both Todd and she herself apparently need the reminder.

Enjolras glances at Grantaire, just a blink of a check-in. Grantaire hopes she can read the apology on her face.

"Hi, let me back up for a second," Todd says. He holds his hand out for Enjolras to shake, oozing self-assurance. "My name's Todd, I'm one of Grantaire's classmates."

"We haven't had a class together for years," Grantaire mutters spitefully. "Thank god."

"One year," Todd corrects, and Grantaire is bitterly glad to see his warm smile take a turn for the wooden.

Enjolras still hasn't shaken his hand. Instead, she transfers her wine glass to her free hand, and tucks the other into the pocket of Grantaire's trousers. "Hello," she says.

Grantaire has never before heard two syllables so packed with disdain. Most of her guilt takes a step back, elbowed to the side by the crude part of her that hollers when hockey players drop their gloves. Embarrassment is in line right behind it, though, shifting from one foot to the other.

Grantaire wriggles her hand into her pocket under Enjolras's. It's a tight fit.

"Do you have a name?" Todd asks, and that look in his eye means he thinks he's being charming, means he thinks he's _flirting_.

"I do," Enjolras says blandly.

Todd laughs. Everyone laughs when faced with Enjolras and trying to buy themselves some time. "Keeping the mystery alive, I like it," he says, and maybe he can sense Enjolras's waning patience, because he hurries along to his follow-up. "So Grantaire and I were just talking, and she couldn't tell me--how long have you two been a thing? It can't be long--I would've remembered seeing you around, I'm sure."

"I've cared for her for years," Enjolras says with a straight face. Grantaire miraculously keeps from giving that utterance the reception it deserves. "She only agreed to go out with me recently, though."

Todd huffs a self-satisfied puff of air, shakes his head slowly. "Bad move," he says to Grantaire. "You should've come up with a more believable lie." The grin is back.

Grantaire could punch him, risk splitting her knuckles on his wretched teeth, but she's aware enough to know that the anger's misplaced. She's more mad at herself, more mad at her own first impulse to agree with Todd.

"Is this how you talk to all women?" Enjolras asks, and any remaining reflex of politeness has been shelved. Contempt sizzles along her skin, making Grantaire's hand sweaty where it's wrapped in hers. "Or just the ones who make you feel inferior?" She cuts Todd off. "No, silly question--I'd assume that all women have that effect on you. Given that, it's no surprise that you've nothing more pleasant with which to occupy your time than trying to pick fights with two people who are, frankly, very happy together."

The hair on the back of Grantaire's neck is standing up, which is good, because soon her legs won't be. _Jesus_. She wants to nominate Enjolras for an Oscar, or failing that, she'd really like to give her a spectacular orgasm.

Enjolras tugs on Grantaire's pocket, addresses her directly. "Can we go? This man is wasting your time."

"For sure," Grantaire says.

She's never had a photographic memory, has never particularly wanted one until now, drinking in Todd's dumbfounded face. Enjolras pulls their joined hands out of Grantaire's pocket and pulls gently. She waits to walk until Grantaire's started, and falls into step as naturally as if she's been doing it for years.

"Is everyone here that awful?" Enjolras asks, much the same way that one would ask if every apartment in the building had bedbugs.

"No," Grantaire promises rashly. "Well, probably not. I don't know that many of the other students graduating this year, but we both know Bossuet's a keeper, and he should be wandering around somewhere nearby. We could find him, or actually, maybe I should find one of my professors after all. Professor Chaubey needs to go on offense against my tapestry, I think--that's what it's called, right? If you're defending, then they're on offense, it just makes sense."

When she's nervous, sometimes Grantaire talks louder, _listen to this, ignore whatever other inanity I'm enacting_. She suspects her volume of creeping up despite the fact that the only person she's trying to distract is herself, and since a good 90% of her cognitive abilities are locked up in tracking the sweep of Enjolras's thumb across her own, that cause is pretty much hopeless.

Enjolras hums noncommittally, which is still more of a response than she usually deigns to give Grantaire's undirected rambles. "You didn't say whether your professor liked your stuff, earlier," she remarks.

"No, I didn't really get the chance to, between the Todd the Terrifically Boneheaded and Enjolras the, the--." Grantaire shakes her head. "And your heroics," she corrects, hoping it sounds ironic and not pathetic. And she'll never get over that if she keeps _poking_ at it, so Grantaire ruthlessly tugs her mind back to Enjolras's implied question. "It went fine with Gros, I suppose. He preferred the picture book over the tapestry, and both of them over my abysmal display last year."

"I'm sure it wasn't that bad," Enjolras says.

Grantaire's traitor feet have led them back to her large piece. She tries to position herself and Enjolras so their backs are to the tapestry and they look like they're having a cool, casual conversation angled vaguely towards J-F's neighbouring painting ("Eyegraphs," abstract but in a way that Grantaire can appreciate). It still feels like the tapestry is staring at them. In fairness, she is supposed to be waiting there for Professor Chaubey to judge her. In unfairness… 

"It really was that bad," Grantaire says. Enjolras squeezes her hand supportively, and _Christ_ , Grantaire wants nothing more than for her to push back so that Grantaire can finally shout about this. Her voice climbs in pitch, becoming shrill, grating. "No, you're not listening, it was absolutely awful. I've spouted some bullshit at professors before, it's part of the deal, but last year I became a--a laughingstock. I wasn't prepared, I looked idiotic." 

Enjolras doesn't say anything that would let Grantaire hate her. "You certainly don't look like an idiot tonight," she says. 

"Well," Grantaire says, and instantly runs out of steam.

Enjolras looks at Grantaire, curious, earnest. And Grantaire can do her best to keep her cordoned off, but Enjolras has never obeyed the constraints of others--she'll look, and she'll see, and Grantaire can only control so much.

A barrier inside her buckles and folds.

Grantaire lets go of Enjolras's hand with a reluctant twitch of her fingers. Enjolras immediately turns to look back at the tapestry, and Grantaire crams her hands inside her pockets. She's had four tiny glasses of wine, it wouldn't be bad to have another, she could go now, she could--

"What do you make of it?" Grantaire asks instead. She rocks up to her toes to get closer to Enjolras's perspective. "Tell me honestly, I'd rather know--and besides, this isn't my favourite thing I've ever done, it's not like you'll be striking me a terrible blow when you point out its flaws."

A hint of alarm sweeps across Enjolras's features. "I don't know too much about art," she says.

'She hates it,' says Grantaire's self-pity.

"That's fine," Grantaire says over the muttering in the back of her head. "Art's just supposed to make people feel things, at the end of the day. It's not more complicated than that, and anyone who pretends it is is lying."

Enjolras nods as if Grantaire's said something very thought-provoking. God help her, it's cute. "This makes me feel--" Grantaire's thoughts hum with awful endings. "Amazed, I suppose. It's an incredible project, it's very... documentary."

Well, she's not wrong. "That's good, that's actually--I was going for that." Grantaire bites at an uneven snag of thumbnail, asks, muffled, "Do you remember all of these?"

She means the moments on the tapestry: the first march in November and the brief lull that followed, the intake of breath before: the French universities, the CÉGEPs, the Anglo universities all dominoed in; the riot cops and kettlings and mass arrests; Victoriaville, the first permanent injuries; the bans of masks and large gatherings; the casseroles and screaming and forty-nine people trying to make the noise of a thousand; the chaos, and (nearly an afterthought) the slinking back to school in September.

She hadn't included the tension after that. It was hard to paint silences and uncomfortable unspoken gulfs between those in the studio who had voted against, and those who had voted for.

"Of course I remember," Enjolras says. Of course. "But what--after November tenth, I don't think I understand what that panel is."

It's a mess of wounded colours, Bossuet's black eye as seen through Facebook because that's where Grantaire had seen it first. She'd gone to the daytime march, then followed her friends from kick-boxing into a pub and settled in for the evening. Her phone had remained in her pocket and she hadn't checked until she'd left. She still remembers the first jolt of nausea. His bruise, and the dozens, then hundreds of eager thumbs held up in approval.

"Bossuet got tripped into a door," Grantaire thinks she says. Her tongue is clumsy with it. "He got a black eye."

"Wasn't that in the spring?" Enjolras asks. "In April."

"No," Grantaire says. "It was November, because you and I, we were already neck-deep in stupid Facebook debates by the time the fall term was ending, and the very first one was on that fucking picture. The opening volley." _Some things are worth-- Fuck off._

Enjolras hums, still staring at the blue-black-red-green blur. She's composed.

Grantaire wants to push it, to lean into that brief flash of their acquaintance when she could genuinely feel reservation about her adoration for Enjolras, the six months where there had been temperance and nuance, the six months where she could've said _no_ and meant it to anything Enjolras could've asked of her. (Saying _no_ to get a reaction doesn't count. That's just boring, predictable attention-seeking.) Enjolras had gone to war, Enjolras had brought the better part of the Amis under her banner, Enjolras had left Grantaire sleepless and worried and trying to feed a couple hundred people daily with a skeleton staff of ungainly, inexperienced volunteers.

But Grantaire's hurt has scabbed over, and there's new skin there now, stronger for the wounding. It hadn't been Enjolras's fault that she'd done the right thing, and it hadn't been Grantaire's fault that she couldn't have.

 _So what, I can be the 10,001st person on the street? What's the point? It doesn't_ matter.

"I'm sure," Grantaire reiterates.

"Sorry," Enjolras miraculously says. "I didn't mean to call your fact-checking into question, I just don't remember it that way." She's looking at Grantaire now, clearly seeing some trace of that scar in the hunch of her shoulders.

Grantaire straightens up in response. "That makes... sense, that makes sense." She tells her tapestry, because she doesn't know if she could tell Enjolras right now: "You expect to remember the big events the best, right, because you build yourself around them. So you take them out, and you think about them, and you pass them from hand to hand. But the more you do that, the more you fuck them up. There was this one study--" Nobody cares about any sentence that begins that way. She cuts herself off. "You're right, we probably don't remember it the same way."

Grantaire knows that she's pressed her own self-conscious fingerprints into every memory of her and Enjolras's interaction, that there's nothing even related to objectivity in anything she has to say on the subject. But. But she still remembers the anxious checking of notifications, the half hour spent typing up another screed in response, the reread of her own words and realisation that she hated half of what she'd been saying. She remembers it had started in November. (She remembers avoiding Bossuet, then babying him, then avoiding him again.)

"Last year was an enormous struggle for everyone," Enjolras says, taking Grantaire's words with a tilt of her head instead of pushing _back_. Grantaire wants to shake her. Grantaire might just shake instead. She'd been prepared for antagonism, but what she's getting instead is Enjolras's shoulder against hers and an offered, "But we made it through."

\--

Professor Chaubey has questions about the composition, about how it's barely "mixed" media, about the technique, and thank god: not about the politics.

Enjolras stays, hands wrapped in the ends of her scarf, and Enjolras listens.

Grantaire talks straight through the surprise on Chaubey's face.

\--

"They loved it, I'm a genius, I'm never looking at that damn font again." Bossuet jitters triumphantly. "Now show me something pretty."

Grantaire goes for the easy joke and hooks her thumb towards Enjolras. "Voila."

It defies belief, how tonight Enjolras seems able to take her ordinary annoyance at a display like that and transmute it into a worn-in, familiar joke. "Very cute," she says, and graces Grantaire with a smile.

"I'll say," Grantaire says over Bossuet's "And how!"

Bossuet blinks at Grantaire and she frowns back. "We need to hang out soon," Bossuet says. "We're getting out of synch."

"If we keep going at this rate, we might develop our own personalities," Grantaire agrees. "Horrifying."

There's a particular stifled chuckle that Enjolras is prone to give when she thinks you're funny, but doesn't wish to encourage you. Grantaire wants to record it in stereo, set it as her ringtone, brand it on her back.

"How are you two lovebirds holding up?" Bossuet asks cheerfully.

Enjolras defers to Grantaire with a tiny shrug. Grantaire would give an arm to be able to divine what the right answer to that is. "Good," she hazards.

"Great," Enjolras corrects, and tucks her arm around Grantaire's waist. "Grantaire defended her big painting incredibly, and she said her prof liked her book."

Bossuet takes that at a different value than Enjolras had meant to offer. "Oh did he?"

"Just Gros," Grantaire says. "He stopped by earlier. St-Pierre hasn't seen it yet, though, so who knows."

"But Gros approved?" Bossuet knows more about the story, having helped write it; he knows how much it means to Grantaire, and how much she wishes she could be rational about it. 

"You know him," she says. She crosses her arms, bringing her fingers into incidental contact with where Enjolras's rest on her side. Their knuckles bump. "Gros will not compliment when he can mumble something noncommittal, he will not smile when he can glare meaningfully instead. The man wouldn't know positive feedback if it jumped up and down throwing treats at him."

"So he liked it," Bossuet confirms.

He'd opened the book a second time, just to enjoy it. Grantaire presses her lips together to hold in the hope, the warmth.

"I'm glad, you deserve this," Bossuet says. If Grantaire were Joly or Musichetta, he'd have trusted her to see that in the brightness of his eyes, the width of his smile; he knows he has to spell it out for Grantaire. He tilts his head at Enjolras. "And what did you think of it?"

Grantaire only appreciates how relaxed Enjolras's arm around her had been when it loses that softness, becoming an awkward, rigid press against her back. "I haven't seen it yet," Enjolras says.

"It's not--" Grantaire reflexively prepares to manage expectations (it's not that good, not that important, not the art you're looking for), but Bossuet's had practice talking over her.

"You haven't shown her your book? But you actually _like_ it," and that's the problem. What's more, Bossuet is _aware_ that's the problem. He must have decided that he knows better, and Grantaire doesn't care to remember that given their track record, he's probably right. "I can't support this," he declares, and gathers both Grantaire and Enjolras in an imperious, shepherding wave of his arms. "We're going to the illustration cubbyhole, c'mon folks!"

"I spent approximately an eternity there with Gros," Grantaire says, a last-ditch gamble because Enjolras has shown a mild tendency to stick with her, so maybe… "I should stay down here and finish exploring. I haven't really investigated the wilds of the intermedia section, and I owe it to my fellow students to appreciate the fruits of their labour."

"I'll go up and keep Bossuet company," Enjolras says, shit.

Bossuet fist-pumps dramatically, and Grantaire decides, "Okay, great, let's all go together."

She'll run interference, subtly steer them towards other students' projects. Or she'll grab the book and stuff it under her shirt and run away shouting. Sometimes you have to play these things by ear.

"Excellent," crows Bossuet. He steps forward and sets the three of them in motion. "And Enjolras, you should ask her what you asked me before. It'll make her look a little less like she's about to go into battle."

"Hey," Grantaire protests. There's something about navigating a crowd of people in the company that she's keeping that makes Grantaire's heart clench. She finds herself reaching for Enjolras's hand as they start up the stairs, and Enjolras allows her hand to be held. In return Grantaire allows her to catch her eye for the first time since Bossuet started them on this awful road to openness.

Enjolras rubs at the back of her neck and grins. "I didn't know what the difference was between illustration and… the rest of this. I mean, it all kind of counts as illustrating stuff, right?"

Loathe though she is to prove Bossuet right, Grantaire has to admit that's a pretty good distractor. Her jaw drops a fraction. "Are you just messing with us? We'll find out, if you are. We're very good detectives."

"She was totally serious, but don't worry, I set her straight," Bossuet says.

Enjolras holds up Grantaire's hand demonstratively. "Straight?" she asks, and Bossuet groans.

"Come on," he says. He can't leave double meaning un-responded-to, though, so he continues, "You have to admit that was low-hanging fruit."

"Terrible," Grantaire says. "Both of you." She makes a feeble play for retrieving her hand; she's aiming to fail, but instead Enjolras lets her go and fixes her with an intent stare.

"Is this okay?" Enjolras asks in a passable undertone. She's being considerate, or she's trying to get out of losing a pun-off to Bossuet.

It is okay and it isn't, but Bossuet's already decided which one of those matters more. Grantaire's followed his lead on more serious matters than this. "Yeah," she says, and packages it with a smile.

Enjolras takes her at face value because she herself isn't the sort of person who'd lie in this situation.

"You're going to like this," Bossuet says to Enjolras. "Hers is totally the best one in the room, you'll be proud."

\--

If Grantaire uncorks her mouth, she won't be able to stop the spill of words. She pictures herself being held upside-down, words brimming at her toes and dripping out of her ears, the flood only kept at bay by her stubborn mouth. _Don't read anything into it, please like it, please don't tell me what you're thinking, please tell me everything you're thinking so that I can tell you when you're wrong. It's not me, it's art, only actually maybe this one is a little bit me after all._

Bossuet's a better tour guide, reading over Enjolras's shoulder despite the fact that he's seen this book a thousand times, had helped tangle up the story when Grantaire had needed a plot and untangle her head when she'd needed to be brought down. He's unabashed in his enthusiasm for the parts he likes, pokes at the page gleefully ("See his face? Look at that!") and bites a grin when Enjolras bats him aside so she can read at her own pace.

She's reading and Grantaire absolutely can't watch her expression twitch in slight reaction to what she's seeing on the page. There is no interference to be run, and Grantaire had been fooling herself when she'd hoped she could keep anything from Enjolras.

"I'm going to find another glass of wine," Grantaire says in a rush. "I should stop hovering, I'll--does anyone want something?" Enjolras flicks her eyes up but doesn't seem to see Grantaire clearly--she goes straight back to the story. Her lips are parted. Bossuet gives her two thumbs up, and good, that's an answer. She stutters over, "Uh, red, white, mix 'em together?"

She doesn't run away from them, but she wouldn't say she walks, either.

"Thanks," she tells the person working the wine table, and grabs a red and a white.

Even just the smell, the feeling of a wine glass in her hand (comfortable, pinched at the stem and full at the bowl) quiets some of her shrieking nerves. She doesn't drink yet; she'll let Bossuet choose which he wants and take the other for herself. A thought rolls across her mind, that she wouldn't have shown this kind of restraint four years ago. She's growing up, maybe. Or at least, she'd grown scared enough of something down deep to grow up, up, and away from it.

Enjolras is a fast reader. By the time Grantaire comes back, she and Bossuet are already talking. Grantaire can hear them clear across the room, sentences blurring into each other in indecipherable chatter. They're excited, Grantaire thinks. She pauses and looks, careful, careful.

Bossuet's hands are flying in full force, and Enjolras… She's animated. Lit-up. _Grinning_ , her teeth flashing too-too bright, and between that and the fucking dress, Grantaire actually has to bite her tongue to ground herself.

( _Did I do that?_ )

She squares her shoulders, or tries, and makes her way to Bossuet and Enjolras. "I got one of each," she says, and offers them both to Bossuet. "Your call."

Bossuet claims the red, which Grantaire could have predicted; Enjolras takes the white, which she wouldn't have. Enjolras doesn't tend to drink around Grantaire--it often serves to make Grantaire uncomfortable in a roundabout way, that her presence and past excesses lead Enjolras to deprive herself, but there are times when it's been a comfort, too. Tonight, she'll take anything that tips the balance between them slightly even, even if it means giving up a glass she'd intended to drink herself.

"Grantaire," Enjolras says, like her name is something wonderful. "My god, you're so good! How long did this take? Did you really write the whole thing?"

"No," Grantaire answers.

"She did," Bossuet answers. "But I helped a little."

"A lot," Grantaire says, and if she were allowed to do all her self-promotion as part of a chorus, maybe she wouldn't hate it so much. "It would've been a sad portrait of a kid with a magic wand if you hadn't given me somewhere to go."

"Regardless," Enjolras says, waving off Grantaire's angst with a callous twitch of her fingers. This, this is very Enjolras--it doesn't fit the girlfriend persona she'd been cultivating all night. Something hiccups in Grantaire's chest: _there you are_. "You're the one who put it all together, and it is such a _good story_."

Grantaire smiles, she thinks, and she definitely stares. She can feel her pulse in all her empty fingers, tapping at the skin as the seconds tick by. "Thanks," she manages.

"Did you have a favourite part?" Bossuet asks. He turns the book end-over-end, a mischievous fidget.

His question elicits a hum and a bounce from Enjolras. It makes the fabric of her dress swish--Grantaire forcefully discards this information. "Of the art or of the story?" Enjolras asks. "Or both, I guess, because I suppose it's hard to separate the one from the other."

Bossuet grins and Grantaire's face feels warm. "The balance was something she worked on," Bossuet says, and Grantaire can't tell if he's punishing her or helping her by acting as the training wheels for this conversation.

"It surprised me how earnest it was," Enjolras says. "And not heavy-handed, considering the whole addiction allegory with Elie's magic. Everything was handled with a lot of respect and care, more than most adults would give kids' books."

"Do I really count as an adult, though?" Grantaire jokes automatically. It's the only part of the whole conversation that she can field.

"I'd say so," says Enjolras with--Grantaire must be imagining it--a slight smirk and a fleeting once-over. 

Her skin itches. It wants to crawl off her bones and be closer to Enjolras. She can't let it, but she can't do anything else, either. For the second time that night, she feels like a ghost wearing someone else's body and taking credit for their work. This time, it feels like Enjolras can see both layers of her all the same, the artist and the artifice.

Bossuet spins the book again. He might be smiling.

"Are you selling these?" Enjolras asks.

\--

By the time St-Pierre finally appears (drunker than Grantaire, but hiding it well) Bossuet and Enjolras have collectively eroded a single protective layer of Grantaire's nonchalance, and god help her, she's endeared.

"If you're quite ready," St-Pierre says.

He addresses Grantaire by her given name, which always reminds her absurdly of how her grandmother had said it, adding an extra curl to each syllable. He also does a terrible job of not staring at Enjolras like he wants to get out a pen and paper out right there. Grantaire all but shoves her book into his face.

Bossuet pulls himself aside to delight in the portfolio of one of Grantaire's classmates, then hopefully to go home and be unconscious until they reconvene tomorrow afternoon. Grantaire's expecting Enjolras to go, too, but instead she just laces her fingers together around her glass and tilts her head. She leans into Grantaire very slightly, and (not for the first time that night) she stays.

\--

Grantaire sags sideways against the window and her heart spins. The glass is cold even through her blazer.

"If he hadn't liked it, I would've taken him down," Enjolras informs Grantaire, voice buzzing with affection. "It wouldn't have been pretty, but I would've done it."

"I'm done," she says, the words small and unbelievable. They sit like lies on her tongue.

Last year, last year, last year--she can stop thinking about it. Graduation has always seemed like less of a milestone and more of a wall she could hide behind, keep it between her and her failure, between her and her cowardice. 'We all did some crazy things in undergrad,' maybe. 'I watched out for my friends the best I could.' She can tell herself that and mean it.

Enjolras grabs her hand, even though Grantaire had taken care to find an out-of-the-way nook for her inevitable freak-out and there's nobody to fool, here. Grantaire's already been fooled, Enjolras can save her effort. She squeezes until Grantaire drags her eyes away from the lights in the office building across the street.

"You're done," Enjolras repeats. Her makeup is somehow still flawless, hours after it must have been applied. She's happy for Grantaire. The world is full of unbelievable facts that will remain true no matter how strange they seem.

A giggle shakes through Grantaire. "Done, but not done for," she says. The pun works better in French-- _j'ai finis, mais chuis pas encore finie_ \--so she tacks it on in a whisper, and Enjolras smiles.

Enjolras has this trick--or no, that's unfair. Grantaire plays a trick on herself very often, and it goes like this:

Step one, insist that Enjolras doesn't care, doesn't notice, has tunnel vision and no reason to look outside the siren circle of her goals.  
Step two, patrol that boundary between yourself and what you think Enjolras should pay attention to. Booby-trap it.  
Step three, be stunned when reality impinges upon your expectations.

Enjolras does _everything_ she does because she gives a shit, and because she finds value in the people around her. And like it or not, sometimes "the people around her" is Grantaire. She notices.

She takes the switch to French (a whim, Grantaire had thought) and runs with it. "How are you feeling?" Her voice is different when she speaks French, when she shouts it into a bullhorn, when she counts money under her breath or tries to remember the order of the planets.

Grantaire begins, "I thought I would never--" There are too many paths for that phrase to take, so many that they don't come easily even to her maternal tongue (nothing has ever come easily to Grantaire's maternal _anything_ ).

She lets the words wander off on their own. She looks out the window again, to see if they went out there.

Enjolras perches on the edge of the table that takes up most of the disused alcove they're hiding in. She tucks her hands under her thighs, the motion meaning her boots make incidental contact with Grantaire's legs.

The unfinished sentence is weighing on her, Grantaire imagines. It gets on her nerves when people don't follow through.

They can hear music from the main halls, just the walking bass line meandering through the walls over the sounds of much diminished chatter.

"There's nearly nobody remaining," Grantaire remarks instead. It's an empty comment--Grantaire's too full of gradually unfurling confusion to offer anything else. She graduates, _et pis?_ Last year's in the ground, planted or put to rest; where's next year? She takes a breath by force.

"It's late enough. They've probably all gone home for the night," Enjolras says. Her feet swing very slightly, and Grantaire's bones still ache to carry her closer. "In fact, I was just about to ask you if you wanted a last glass of something celebratory."

It doesn't register.

"At mine," Enjolras clarifies, and it's the soft consonant of _chez_ that pushes Grantaire into some sort of comprehension--

"What?"

\--not that she's going to admit it.

"Haha," Grantaire says. "Performance art. I wouldn't've taken you for the type, but I guess you never know, these days. There can be a Dadaist lurking behind every tree." These particular vocabularies, art and defensiveness, these she has in English--she shoves herself back into the language in which their relationship and all its pitfalls and walls and bruises already exist. "I have to warn you, though, if you've got designs on remaking the Gas-Operated Heart, Jehan and I have first dibs. We're gonna go green."

Enjolras brushes her braids up and back into a bun without anything to hold it, twisting her hair and letting it fall. She can't be serious. 

"I mean it," Enjolras says. "I've had a good night, and if you want to have a drink with me, or anything, I'd like that." Her braids get gathered up again, cradled, let go.

"Is this because of…" There's nothing specific Grantaire can think of. "Tonight? Now you think I'm… I don't know, a die-hard red square-er? Capable of finishing something for the first time in my life?"

"No, that's not it, I--" Enjolras pauses.

Grantaire had been supposed to interrupt her there. It's what she would normally have done. She's got enough on her plate bottling up the _yes_ that's been building up in her chest for years, though; she holds her tongue.

Her reward: Enjolras fidgets her feet together, gaps between boot and shin appearing and disappearing. She's looking out the window for some words, too. 

"That doesn't make sense." Oh good, she found them. Grantaire's stomach swims in anticipation of--what, exactly? "You know you helped the strike last year; without your Twitter there could've been a lot more trouble. You kept us informed."

"I still could've shown up for actions."

Enjolras twists her hands minutely out and up, baring a question in her palms. "But where would the PDT have been?"

Normally when Grantaire's having this fight, it's silent, and she's reading the other role. She blinks. She swallows.

"Besides," Enjolras says, and now she's tucking her hair over one shoulder, smoothing the braids down together. "I've admired how hard you work ever since my first shift. It's not news to me."

In January, Grantaire had gone skating at Parc Lafontaine with Musichetta and Jehan and a few of their friends. She'd been rusty, the ice had been pitted, it had been too dark to see where the ice dipped around the far side of the pond. Her feet had slipped forwards. Her weight slammed back. The _thud_ of ass, elbow, shoulder hitting the ice--this feels like that.

"You _remember_ that?"

"Maybe differently from how you do," Enjolras says with another one of those private smiles from earlier, _you're in on the joke_. "But of course." The sliver of a smile widens to a grin. "I only showed up an hour before service, R--you were in the middle of everything, I was in the way, and you still found time to hold my hand through making a half dozen chocolate zucchini cakes. You were great."

"Oh," says Grantaire, because really what else is there to say. She remembers Enjolras.

"If you don't want to come with me, obviously there's no pressure," Enjolras clarifies, eyes big and brown and compelling. "But for whatever it's worth, I really would like you to."

That first shift of Enjolras's, Grantaire mostly just remembers trying not to stare. Those had been the days when Enjolras was still dressing very high femme, all kitten heels and perfect lipstick; Grantaire, hungover, headachey, and trying to calculate whether the beans had been soaking for long enough to safely throw into the stew, had grunted some sort of greeting at this perfect apparition and shoved her at a recipe. A lot of volunteers do a prep shift once and never again.

But then Enjolras had shown up at the PDT's first planning meeting of the year. And then Combeferre had found this fantastic first-year who wanted to help him organize peer tutoring. And then Joly had come home from QPIRG rhapsodising about this new go-getter who had _experience_ , who had _ideas_. And then Musichetta, Cosette, and Eponine had drafted this terrible yet enthusiastic woman for their queer bowling league team (Grantaire still has a _The Femmepires Strike Back!!_ cheer squad t-shirt), and then, and then… Grantaire couldn't even manage to keep on top of her PDT rotation, her schoolwork, and her kick-boxing, which she'd dropped a year ago. She'd had no idea how people like Enjolras could exist, she'd only known that they weren't supposed to exist in the same spheres as people like her.

Enjolras nudges her knee with a gentle boot. There's a ghost of a salt stain around the sole.

Fuck it.

"Yes," Grantaire says, after three years. Has the word always sounded this--. She corrects herself, "Oui, bien sûr." Her lips curl up without permission; her heart feels like it's going to beat its way out of her chest. She can't wrangle English right now. "S'il te plairait."8

The grin Enjolras had been wearing before is put to shame by her expression now. It's _blinding_.  "Oh, il me ferait plaisir," she says.9

The table creaks as Enjolras slides off it, and her fingers flick down automatically to fix the hang of her skirt. She's so close Grantaire can feel the heat rolling off her body. Grantaire sucks in her gut, an old insecurity she's too raw to push back against.

"Do they need you here for anything else?" Enjolras asks. She reaches--carefully?--and combs through the cowlick that Grantaire can never get to lie flat. "Or do you want to leave now?"

\-- 

It's a ten-minute walk to Enjolras's from the Visual Arts building. It's enough time for a smoke, but Grantaire doesn't indulge. If she lit up once, she knows she'd smoke cigarette upon cigarette, a nervous chain of puffs following behind them.

Instead, she breathes in Enjolras's words, lets the level, happy rhythms of her voice thread through her arteries and take her heartbeat down a notch.

"Apparently it was a critique of materialism and consumable culture, but I swear, all I saw was a blanket made of Polaroids of garbage cans. That was it!" She'd claimed her long black coat from the impromptu coat check on their way out, and Grantaire's a little jealous. Her blazer's warm, but not enough so to combat the chill. "If that had been the only piece I'd seen tonight, I would've thought you had it easy in your program."

"Hah," Grantaire says. The magnitude of _easy_ robs her of further retort.

"The range of work was incredible," Enjolras goes on. "It seems bizarre to me that you walk out of there with the same degree as J-F, for instance, when your projects seemed so vastly different."

They turn up Mackay, where the sidewalk becomes overshadowed and hemmed in by scaffolding. Despite the cold, Grantaire runs her fingers along the criss-crosses of the freezing metal beside her. Enjolras's shoulder bumps hers.

"Isn't that just how school works?" Grantaire asks. "I bet you had classmates who churned out essays that violently disagreed with yours, and they still get degrees for some reason."

"Yeah, I'd been hoping they'd fix that system by the time we graduated," Enjolras says, flashing a grin at Grantaire. "Oh, before I forget I should tell you: If you sincerely wanted another drink, I'm afraid I'll disappoint you--Combeferre finished every last drop when he came over for a writing party on Thursday." She fishes her phone out of her pocket to check the time. "Ah, but we might be in time to catch the dubious downstairs dep before it closes."

"You're offering me alcohol?"

They're nearly at Enjolras's building--if Grantaire were to squint, she'd be able to see whether the dep is indeed open. She doesn't. Instead, she glances back to look at Enjolras, whose pace has fractionally dropped off. 

"I thought I'd already done that," Enjolras says. She's trying to see something in Grantaire's face. "I didn't think you'd mind, but if I shouldn't've brought it up--"

"It's fine, I'm not--" upset, dependent, going to ask you for anything. She does a quick calculation (wine drunk from wine desired, modulus sobriety needed) so that she has a better way to finish her phrase. "I'm not fixed on drinking any more tonight." A smile. "This already seems unbelievable enough, doesn't it? No reason to add that into the mix."

Enjolras shrugs, and it's hard to read her expression with the scaffolding blocking the light from the street lamps. "I wouldn't say 'unbelievable,'" she says, and draws even with Grantaire in one long stride. She catches Grantaire's cold hand with her warm one. "I'll give you 'surprising,' though."

"Stunning?" Grantaire suggests as a compromise.

They arrive at the steps to Enjolras's building with Enjolras gifting Grantaire with the same _I really shouldn't be laughing_ chuckle that she'd wielded against Grantaire earlier.

She quiets as she swipes her key fob over the magnetic lock and tugs the door open. She's clearly thinking something over.

"What's on your mind?" Grantaire asks before she can catastrophise her way to an answer on her own.

Enjolras has infinite good qualities; one of them is her directness.

"I was thinking that you're easier to talk to in French," Enjolras says, a spark of a smile in her delivery that defuses any potential sting. Grantaire lets herself be towed towards the stairwell, lets herself believe that when Enjolras continues, "We should've done this long ago," she means _talk_ , or _be friendly_ , because _fuck_ stretches past the realm of the plausible.

The last time Grantaire had seen these stairs, she'd been running up them on her way to collect Joly and Gavroche, _it looked pretty broken_ still tumbling around her head. She'd been double-parked.

"I can sometimes be mean in English," Grantaire half-agrees. Her brain's stuck; she can only react, respond, reply. "French, too."

"I wouldn't say that exactly. We just don't usually talk like this."

As if it's a coincidence, and not a reality that Grantaire's been orchestrating throughout the last three years. "Yeah," Grantaire says. "Usually we don't."

"I'm looking forward to that changing," Enjolras says, and flashes her a smile from a few steps above.

"Yeah, I--me too."

They arrive at the third floor in relative silence. Enjolras waits for Grantaire at the landing, holds the door open for her and steers her through with a hand at her back.

"Such courtesy," Grantaire says, mimes doffing a cap.

Enjolras sweeps a tiny curtsey in reply. "It was nothing."

It's warm in Enjolras's building, but Grantaire still hasn't shaken off the cold from outside. As Enjolras shuffles through her truly impressive keyring to get to the one she wants, Grantaire burrows her hands into her opposite sleeves and wraps them around her forearms. She'll soak in the warmth, so that she--

The key turns in the lock, and Enjolras turns to tell Grantaire, "Before we go in, I should remind you that it's the end of term." A shadow of a frown drifts over her features when she notices the criss-cross of Grantaire's arms. "Are you cold?"

"I'll warm up." She's more interested in whatever Enjolras had been hinting at. "Why do you bring up the time of semester?"

Enjolras scratches her cheek, shedding some of the dignity naturally bestowed upon her by virtue of her height and judicious use of stylish clothes. "Right now, everyone's got better things to do than clean."

A grin slips across Grantaire's face like a crack in an egg, all sudden, delighted edges, departing from control. "Is it a _mess_?" she asks.

There are implications to the admission that Grantaire could drag out, consequences and causes and effects, but she can't, because the door is opening and Enjolras is pulling her in and--.

The door closes behind them, and they're lit by the dim glow of Enjolras's desk lamp.

Enjolras's hand is on the back of Grantaire's neck, and Grantaire's hands struggle back out of each other's sleeves.

Enjolras asks, and Grantaire answers the only way she possibly could.

And Enjolras kisses her, and she's kissed. 

There's a moment of empty-handedness, when Grantaire's eyes flutter but don't close, and her heart stalls out. The only nerves sending sizzling spikes brainwards are the ones under Enjolras's careful hands and lips, which have decided to double their output to make up for the hollowness in the rest of her body.

The moment gives way to the next. She breathes in the smell of Enjolras's skin and clutches the heavy fabric of her winter coat. Her eyes fall shut to match Enjolras's. She kisses her back. Her heart stutters into one beat, then another, and another, and another. 

Enjolras breaks away, dropping a kiss on Grantaire's cheek to soften the loss. "I need to--" She starts unbuttoning her coat.

"I'll help you out," Grantaire volunteers instinctively, and tackles the bottom buttons. The buttons are slippery and unsteady, and take some work to slip through their holes. She can only get two done before Enjolras's progress meets hers, and Enjolras briefly squeezes her hands in a short strong steadying grasp.

"Thanks," Enjolras says. Grantaire looks up into her slight smile.

"Always a pleasure," Grantaire says. Her hands trace the open edges of the black wool up to Enjolras's collar, keep the scarf between their own chill and Enjolras's vulnerable skin. "Sincerely, anytime you'd like help divesting yourself of any clothes, I'd be happy to be of service."

"I'll keep that in mind." Enjolras shrugs out of her coat without stepping away from Grantaire, reaches around her to hang it up on a hook. "Though right now I think I'd rather you turn those skills to yourself."

Grantaire is already struggling out of her own blazer before Enjolras finishes the sentence. It's hard, because the entryway to Enjolras's apartment is small, and Enjolras isn't helping matters and stepping away from her--instead, she's taking off her scarf, elbow bumping the wall. Grantaire hangs her blazer on top of Enjolras's coat, a precarious balancing act of fabric and tension that Enjolras secures with her scarf.

"There we go," Enjolras says into Grantaire's hair. "And you can put your shoes wherever."

The shoes littering the hard-worn hardwood had already made that clear, but the implied command ( _take your shoes off, come in, stay_ ) sends a charge through Grantaire. She crouches near Enjolras's feet to untie her laces, recklessly bringing her perspective to a place she'd previously lost days in imagining.

"Later, boots," Grantaire says mournfully as Enjolras efficiently unzips and discards them.

"You like them?" Enjolras asks.

"You have no idea," Grantaire responds too-honestly, and abandons her view looking up the length of Enjolras to step out of her own shoes.

"Expand on this," Enjolras says. She's grinning like a hungry thing. Her shoulders, free of her scarf for the first time that night, are settled, confident.

"They look good on you," is a safe enough opening gambit. "Not that your calves were lacking anything to begin with, but they are simply deadly when put through the formula of firstly being dipped in black leather, secondly sporting a 'don't-fuck-with-me' attitude, and thirdly being paired with your gait, as painfully purposeful as can be. I want to--" Her filter puts up a token warning, and she shuts up.

"You want…" Enjolras's hand closes around Grantaire's wrist; she pulls her out of the entrance and into the apartment proper. There's a couch covered in unfolded laundry and school detritus. Enjolras bypasses it in favour of the short, dark hallway to the right. To her room.

"To put them back on you," Grantaire says, mind split between where the inexorable pressure on her wrist is taking her, and the possible world she's sketching, one where she can kneel and slide a zipper over dark skin, hiding it in tough, weathered leather. "Clean them." Her voice grinds to a halt before it can fully incriminate her. She'd grovel, maybe. Do a good enough job to make Enjolras take notice, or a bad enough one.

"Cheeky." The shame wells up before she sees Enjolras's grin. It's still hungry. "Maybe something for a second date," she suggests.

"And us not even on our first," Grantaire replies, hoarse. She stretches up for a kiss, and after a heart-dropping beat of hesitation, Enjolras meets her.

Instead of cataloguing anything about her surroundings, Grantaire prioritises the feeling of Enjolras warming her up, the sounds of Enjolras sighing, the sight of Enjolras dropping her blessed red dress to the ground. Her skin is bare and smooth and Grantaire can't do anything other than babble praise, and touch.

They find the bed. Some time must pass; Grantaire hopes she'll remember it later. She knows she rushes, that her hands shake as she undoes the clasp of Enjolras's bra. At some point, the universe will assert its rightful order, and Enjolras will come to her senses. Grantaire's greedy. She wants to have as much of her as she can in the interim.

"That's right, babe," and Enjolras's hands flex in Grantaire's hair.

She shouldn't get it cut after all, she thinks wildly, she should let it grow and grow if only so it can always somehow have Enjolras's hands in it. It can be a leash, or reins, or chains, it doesn't matter.

Grantaire kisses the hinge of Enjolras's jaw and listens to her breathe, "Yes, now a little lower?" and trails her nose down the side of Enjolras's perfect neck. She drinks in Enjolras's chuckle and limns the line of her throat with kisses. She doesn't have it in her to find moderation.

She smothers her words in Enjolras's skin, _I never thought I'd_ \-- in the curve of her breast and _God in Heaven you're_ \-- in the planes and angles of her ribs. Her hands tremble on Enjolras's thighs.

"Do you want to eat me out?" Enjolras asks. Or Grantaire thinks, _hopes_ she does, because Grantaire's nodding wildly and pressing a kiss just under her navel. Enjolras's voice is husky, affected, when she says, "You can if you want, I just need to--oh."

Grantaire's hands have done many things, but none of them have been as unbelievable as tracing the slightly-sweaty crease where Enjolras's thigh meets her pelvis, as venturing past her underwear ( _black, and wasn't there some--"you don't buy black lingerie unless you want someone to see it," where did that_ \--) to find hot skin. She kisses a spot just above her thumb, lips to cotton, and she couldn't be imagining this.

"I have--here," Enjolras is saying, and it takes more willpower than Grantaire would ever have credited herself with to look up. Enjolras is taking steady breaths through her mouth, hair disheveled ( _perfect_ ), eyes dark and hooded, hands offering a tupperware box of latex gloves. "If you want, they're there."

Something unnamed and huge aches in Grantaire's chest. She's too far from the realm of identifiable words and emotions to tell if it's the consideration, or the familiarity, or the illogical unexpectedness of the gesture. (Of _course_ Enjolras keeps a well-stocked bedroom, of _course_ she's careful.)

"Should I?" The words come out battered, as if her throat had scraped them raw on their way out of her lungs. There's no way Enjolras can hear that and not know the condition of Grantaire's heart right now.

"Only if you want."

"We'll be just fine without them, I think." The words must be loud enough to hear, because Enjolras drops the box over the side of the bed and her hands return to where Grantaire needs them to be, carding through her hair and cupping the base of her head.

"Don't let me stop you, then," Enjolras says, wicked, thrilling.

Grantaire slides Enjolras's underwear off her hips and down past her knees in one sweep of her disbelieving hands. She looks--Grantaire runs her fingers absently over her thighs, which shift as she toes the rest of the way out of her underwear--of course she looks perfect.

There's already an ache in Grantaire's back and joints and along the line her trousers cut into her belly from how she's kneeling, bent double under Enjolras's hands. She doesn't care, she couldn't possibly regret this.

She kisses just under Enjolras's navel again and chances a glance upwards at her, leaning against the headboard and watching Grantaire like a queen surveying her domain. Enjolras tips her thighs apart and makes more room for Grantaire.

"Thanks," Grantaire says nonsensically, and Enjolras's hands card through her hair.

"You're welcome," half-solemn, half-joking.

She closes her eyes and kisses Enjolras's clit, tastes her, and gives up on rational thought again.

Enjolras keeps up a steady stream of cut-off instructions, and pet names, and _yes_ , and _so good for me_ , and twists and sighs under the weight of three years' wishing finally realised.

A careless scratch of fingernails across Grantaire's scalp is her first reward, _she's getting to her_ ; some minutes later, a surging clench around her fingers is the second, matched by a gasp and a tug on her hair that sends warmth directly to her gut.

The sound of Enjolras's breath is loud in the suddenly-obvious quiet. She looks up, against the press of hands on her head, and tries to commit to memory:  
Enjolras  
head tipped back  
breasts two soft spills of skin  
twisted black braids more than mildly mussed  
expression slack, satisfied  
eyes blinking sleepily.

"Wow," Enjolras says. "Brava, you." She passes her thumb over Grantaire's eyebrow, touches her wet mouth.

Unsure what to do with that, Grantaire wiggles her fingers inside Enjolras. "Another go?" she asks.

Enjolras's legs tense. She pushes slightly away from Grantaire, who reclaims her fingers and rubs them together, slick. "Not right this minute," she says. "Ask me again later."

"I will," Grantaire promises.

Enjolras stretches with a groan, and Grantaire straightens up with the same. She doesn't want to make her shirt or trousers any messier than they already are, so in the absence of any tissues she elects to quickly lick her hand clean, before Enjolras noti--

"My god," Enjolras says, just this side of poleaxed. "That's really--come here," she orders.

"I'll make you messy," Grantaire protests, futile, as Enjolras grabs her collar and bends forward to swallow her words in a sloppy kiss.

Her mind's a blooming, buzzing confusion of kiss and limbs and skin, and wanting, and having. Enjolras has a plan in mind, that much is clear, and if Grantaire had half of Enjolras's organizational and spatial reasoning capacities post-orgasm she'd be pretty impressed with herself. Somehow, Grantaire gets pulled into the middle of the bed. Somehow, she's laid flat on her back, a pillow squashed somewhere under her. Somehow, Enjolras accomplishes all of this without breaking from her attentions to Grantaire's mouth and jaw and neck for long enough to allow Grantaire to summon rational thought.

"You're--" too much for Grantaire to articulate, right now.

"I'm?" Enjolras asks. She winds one leg between Grantaire's, and a stupid wrinkle in Grantaire's brain can't suppress the thought of how much dry-cleaning her trousers are going to need after tonight. 

Enjolras is holding some of her own weight on her arms and bracing leg, but there's still a solid pressure where she's curled over and around Grantaire's body, weighing down on her. Grantaire's hands creep, still disbelieving, to Enjolras's spine.

"You're too composed. It's not fair."

Enjolras hums. "I'll tell you something that isn't fair," she drawls, and she's _looking_ at Grantaire now. Grantaire knows she's flushed, but beyond that she has no idea what Enjolras sees. Her skin crawls with nerves and arousal. "You're practically fully-dressed."

"I don't want to get naked," Grantaire says. She hadn't known it would be impossible to lie to an Enjolras whose hand was tracing along the seams of Grantaire's shirtsleeves, whose chest was rising and falling against hers in slight, hypnotic movements--she hadn't known, but she maybe could've guessed. "I wouldn't inflict that on you."

The room gets fractionally colder and bigger when Enjolras slides off Grantaire, settling beside her. Her voice is quieter when she says, "Okay. I'd still like to see as much of you as I can."

Grantaire closes her eyes against the sincerity. She can nearly pretend, in the red-black behind her eyelids, that the world still makes sense. The bed creaks and if Grantaire opens her eyes, she bets Enjolras will be twisted on her side, propped up on one arm, studying Grantaire like she'll be the subject of a quiz.

Even through her eyelids, she can tell when Enjolras shuts off her bedside lamp. There's a rustle, a click, a sudden wash of deeper night.

The darker room calls for hushed voices. A little louder than a whisper, Enjolras asks: "Is this better?"

Grantaire opens her eyes, and barely locates the blurred lines of silhouette that show where Enjolras starts and ends. From what she can tell, Enjolras is indeed studying her, but her gaze is restricted to her face. She's looking for something. Grantaire wants to give it to her, wants to give everything to her. "Yeah," she says.

"Good," and that goes straight to Grantaire's heart. Enjolras tilts her head, and the air in the room gets easier to breathe. "And can I kiss you again?"

The air falls out of Grantaire's lungs on a sighed " _Yes_."

Enjolras suits her action to the word, and leans over to press her lips to Grantaire's like she's sealing a pact. Grantaire feels her whole body react, twist, reach for Enjolras. One elbow gets pressed to the bed as she props herself up to get desperately closer to Enjolras; one foot sneaks between Enjolras's; one hand runs down the burning expanse of Enjolras's back. The kiss breaks when Enjolras laughs, and now Grantaire has felt the tense curve of Enjolras's smile against her own lips. It tingles.

On some level, Grantaire wants to ask why they aren't kissing anymore, but her head can't put the words together. Her hand comes to rest in the sharp dip of Enjolras's waist. She blinks syrup-slow and waits for Enjolras to say what's going on. 

"You made me forget my plan, dearest," Enjolras says. She follows it up with some other words, but after the endearment all Grantaire hears is ringing.

Enjolras's hand is smoothing down the front of her shirt along the path of the buttons. 

"Is that alright?" she asks.

It takes Grantaire's brain a leisurely moment to connect the dots, and Enjolras moves her hand to a more respectable location, back to playing with the seam on her shirtsleeve. "Yes," Grantaire blurts. "Here, I'll help--"

"Thank you." What manners, even while stripping Grantaire of her shirt and, soon, her dignity. "Your skin's so _warm_ ," Enjolras says like Grantaire is personally responsible for this marvellous fact. "And _soft_." She brushes her fingers along Grantaire's arm, and the touch makes Grantaire squirm again.

At least Enjolras is laughing again as she tosses Grantaire's shirt into the corner of the room. At least her stretch marks aren't visible, hidden by her undershirt and the cover of darkness. At least Enjolras seems to like the hitching whimper that Grantaire can't control when faced with Enjolras's hand roaming along her side.

It's silly to lay there in her slacks and undershirt while Enjolras is luxuriantly naked. Grantaire slips out of her pants without thinking too hard about it, knows without seeing it that they leave a harsh red line around her hips from being just a fraction too small.

She's down a complete layer, now.

"Thank you," Enjolras says again, solemnly slips _merci_ into Grantaire's ear. She bites at the transition between lobe and cartilage, and Grantaire doesn't know what noises she's making right now, doesn't want to know. They make Enjolras hum, low and interested. "So that's okay then," she confirms, and Grantaire's hands have ended up on her again, combing through her braids, grasping aimlessly at the jut of her shoulder blade.

"Please," Grantaire begs, and keeps begging.

There's something deliberate, paced about how Enjolras kisses her throat and slips hands into her clothes. Grantaire feels like she's being laid siege to.

It must be an unsatisfying campaign, though, because (to her own surprise) she finds herself arching and coming as soon as Enjolras gets a thumb on her clit.

"Oh," Enjolras says.

Grantaire bites her lip and curls her toes through the aftershocks, and wants to disappear.

"You were excited, hm?" Enjolras sounds… Grantaire takes a deep breath and dares a glance, because her ears may have been lying, but she trusts her eyes not to. In the dark she can make out the gleam of Enjolras's delighted grin.

Enjolras's thumbnail brushes Grantaire's clit as she withdraws her hand from her underwear and Grantaire's body flinches into the contact without first consulting with her mind.

"Evidently." It's a struggle to drop the syllables off her graceless tongue.

"Another go?" Enjolras asks, tugging a wrinkle out of Grantaire's undershirt.

The tickle of air against Grantaire's ear is distracting, and it takes a few harried heartbeats before she realises she's being quoted. What had Enjolras said in--

"It's just that I think we can do better than that," Enjolras says, confident, confiding.

A laugh trembles out of Grantaire. She swallows, twists to her side so she can see Enjolras a little more clearly and pop the bubble of tension building in her hip.

"Okay," she says, and pulls it down from being a question. "Do your worst." A careless challenge; she'd already known that Enjolras's worst is considerably better than Grantaire's best.

"With pleasure." Enjolras presses the words, insistent, into Grantaire's mouth, and punctuates them with a biting kiss.

Enjolras doesn't move to take any more of Grantaire's clothes off, but she still feels stripped, exposed to the bone as Enjolras's hands travel up the swell of her thighs, trip along the creases in her belly, settle over the band of her bra to tease at her nipples. Her nerves are still sparking and oversensitive. Her eyes close, her feet twist together.

She blasphemes a fluent rush of curses when Enjolras moves her attention (and mouth) back to her neck, and her fingers back to her cunt. It's too much, too soon, but Grantaire's always wanted more than she can realistically handle.

"Good," she hears, and her legs spread of their own volition.

She tips her head back. Enjolras sets a relentless, building rhythm, and Grantaire's breath races to follow, acquiring an edge of a whine as Enjolras sets her teeth to Grantaire's clavicle.

She feels a resonance shaking through her hollow insides, but she can't get there. Her teeth grit in frustration, her lips curl back.

"Come on, babe," Enjolras says. The heel of her hand grinds into Grantaire, so close, so close. "Let me see, let me do this for you."

She can feel her face screw up, hideous, _hideous_ , and Enjolras's nails rake along her back, and the tension pulling at Grantaire finally snaps. Her legs twitch, her lungs gasp, she shakes apart in ugly, uncontrolled waves.

"That was beautiful," Enjolras says--lies. She wrings another sob, another shudder out of Grantaire before taking mercy on her and resting her hand on her side.

Grantaire's eyes are still closed, so it's a surprise when Enjolras brushes a kiss onto her burning cheek, but not enough of a surprise to shock her into looking back. She can't open her eyes against the weight of self-consciousness, of dread, of irrational, uncontrollable emotion pounding through her veins. She sucks in deep, fast breaths and wills herself to be capable.

The bed creaks, and if Enjolras is reaching for the light--Grantaire clumsily rolls away from her. "That was incredible, I--" her voice is wrecked. "I'm going to make your sheets gross, I should clean up."

The light flickers on, bright, invasive. Enjolras says her name cautiously, and Grantaire gets her legs off the side of the bed, hunches over.

"Don't worry about the sheets," Enjolras says, and there's a hand on Grantaire's shoulder blade. "Was that alright? You look--"

"More than alright," Grantaire cuts her off. "Give yourself the credit you're due, that was," she fumbles for another word. "--Fantastic." She glances over her shoulder at Enjolras's big eyes and serious mouth. "Sorry, I don't want to alarm you, I'm just…"

Enjolras looks for something in Grantaire's eyes, and Grantaire doesn't want to know what she's finding. Her heart calms fractionally.

Grantaire switches to English for the first time since they'd left the show. "Kinda spacey. I'll take a shower and report back, okay?"

She doesn't stand until Enjolras says, "Okay."

\--

The bathroom mirror coldly informs Grantaire that she's a mess. Besides the usual sins of heaviness and hairiness and lopsidedness, Grantaire is also sporting scattered smudges of Enjolras's foundation and powder. There's a blossoming bite mark on her collarbone. Her lips are lurid, and her face is still sticky from going down on Enjolras.

She takes off her tank top and bra. She turns on the shower and steps in on unsteady legs. The shock of cold steals her breath for a long beat, then she has to fumble to readjust the temperature when the heat kicks in full force.

She steps out of her sodden underwear, picks it up and scrubs it against itself. The spray slowly washes the mess, the smell of sex out of the worn grey cotton. It doesn't do a very thorough job. She turns her attention to her thighs, tracing the lines of the garden plot tattooed there, rinsing the slickness from the soft skin where her legs rub together.

Her thoughts erode under the steady pressure of the water. At an arm's length, she thinks she can see the humming worry she'd been keeping at bay, the fear that this would finally be the night she'd ruin everything with Enjolras. (And maybe she has, by sleeping with her without being honest with her, _I've loved you_ \--)

But the thought is over there, and she's in here.

Enjolras's soap smells nice.

Gradually, she realises that she'll have to make a plan for what happens after the shower. She'll be wet and dripping; she'll need a towel.

She turns the water off, tugs the shower curtain to the side, and looks at the single orange bath towel hanging on the rack. She wonders if she'll take it.

She wrings out her underwear and can't figure out what to do with it next. It can sit on the edge of the tub for now.

There's a knock at the door, and Enjolras calls, "Coming in."

Grantaire only realises Enjolras has elected to keep their conversation in French as she appears tubside, draping a matching orange bath towel over her shoulders and complimenting her tattoos. ("They're lovely, when was it that you had them done?")

The towel's fluffy, and Grantaire's cold. She dries off while answering Enjolras's questions. "When I was eighteen," and "A shop close to Station Beaudry," and "It was a collaboration, my tattoo artist did the lettering," and " _Il faut cultiver notre jardin_ , along the edges there."10

Under the simple, fact-based questioning, her brain turns over and starts chugging again.

"I brought clothes," Enjolras says, and offers a t-shirt and boxers. The t-shirt reads _you can't hug with nuclear arms_ in fading white lettering. The boxers are stripey.

"Thanks," Grantaire says. She's herself enough to frown as she tries to tug them on without dropping the towel. "They're far too big for you, though, did you have them hanging around just in case?"

"Something like that," Enjolras says. She tucks her hair over one shoulder.

The boxers are a little snug, but they're better than any other alternative. Grantaire looks at Enjolras, perched on the toilet and clearly waiting for Grantaire to be ready to capital-T-Talk.

"Thanks for not making me go commando on the ride home," Grantaire elects to say instead.

Enjolras shakes her head, maybe a tinge surprised. "The Metro stopped running an hour ago," she says. "I assumed you were staying here tonight."

"Did you?" And also-- "Shit, did it? What _time_ is it?"

"Just after 2," Enjolras says, and yeah, Grantaire could've maybe figured that out if she'd properly listened, thought for a second. "You're obviously welcome to stay. I'd like to have you."

"Haven't you already?"

Grantaire's dumb quip makes Enjolras flash a short grin. "Not entirely," and okay, maybe Enjolras is trying to kill Grantaire after all.

In hopes that it'll cover for her nearly choking on her tongue, Grantaire folds the towel over the rack like a proper grown woman would. "Well… alright," she says to the towel.

"Good," says Enjolras. "Grantaire," oh no, "I'm going to get ready for bed, too, and then can I talk to you about something?"

"I wouldn't dream of trying to stop you," Grantaire says. "That was rude. I mean: sure. That's probably a good idea."

\--

Enjolras's bedroom has a window, but it just looks out onto the building beside hers. Grantaire leans her forehead against the cold glass and watches car headlights repetitively stroke along wrought-iron balcony railings and brick walls. She feels more herself than she has all day.

When she hears the sink running, she steps away from the window and towards the bed. She tosses the pillows into a slipshod sprawl under the headboard, good enough. She starts straightening the sheets and discovers a few items of clothing scattered through them: a dress, a long skirt, a camisole, a threadbare t-shirt. Her hands still as she pictures Enjolras choosing between them--earlier today, getting ready for the show? Or are these from yesterday, or just laundry that had been too much trouble to put away? 

She rolls her eyes at herself, tugs the sheets flat, and does her best to drape the clothes respectfully on Enjolras's dresser. Her own trousers and shirt get shaken out and half-folded beside Enjolras's; they're a lost cause anyways, doomed to creases and crumples until the next time she cons Joly into lending her his iron.

Her phone gets slipped out of her trouser pocket and checked. Eponine wants to know if she'd survived--the reply can wait until Grantaire is sure, herself. A message from Bossuet ( _are you going out after the show? text me when you get in_ ) because even after he and Joly had moved in with Musichetta, they hadn't quite gotten the hang of not being Grantaire's roommates. She replies ( _going to bed now, thanks for checking in_ ) and bites her lip about whether she'll end up telling anyone about this.

Enjolras nudges the door open, and Grantaire's eyes fly to her the way they always want to. Grantaire smiles, she can't help it--fondness and disbelief demand it of her.

"You made the bed," Enjolras notes with a matching smile. "You didn't have to."

"To the contrary, my dear," Grantaire says. She blusters past the endearment. "If I'm to sleep in here--and I assume that was what you'd meant? I've seen your sofa, after all--then I'm afraid I must insist on a tidy bed. I might be a night owl, but I still prefer not to sleep in a nest."

The bedsprings creak as Enjolras settles easily on it, cross-legged in plain blue pajamas. "When I'm occupied, it ends up being more of a pile than a nest, even," she admits. "But it is nicer to sleep with it all made up, I just get focused on other things."

"I know," Grantaire says. She stays where she's standing, tucked against the dresser and wiggling her toes into the small rug there.

Enjolras squeezes her shoulders up to her ears and lets them drop with a sigh. She looks at Grantaire. "I wanted to check in," she says. Grantaire wants to steal her level confidence and run away with it into the night. "Did I cross any boundaries before? You left in a hurry, earlier."

The sheer number of boundaries that have been crossed tonight looms up in front of Grantaire. She shakes her head, changes her mind, equivocates. "That's a hard question to answer--no, sorry, not like that, don't look so stricken." She bites her thumbnail. "You didn't do anything bad, but you know there had been dozens of boundaries up between you and me, and we thoroughly dismantled the better part of them."

"Still--"

"I'm just trying to say that we'd never fucked before, right? In the three years we've known each other, not once. That's a pretty big change. And now..."

"We have," Enjolras says. She nods.

"That's all," Grantaire says. "You have nothing to be sorry for. Shit, if anything," she laughs and oh, there the words are, the ones that will get her in trouble. "I'd say _I_ should be apologising to _you_."

Dark eyes narrow, confused. "How do you figure?"

Grantaire's heartbeat picks up from where it had slowed to. "I should've been more honest with you." She cracks the joints of her knuckles and fully intends to continue. She can be brave.

"On what subject, precisely?" Enjolras asks. "And here, sit down--you're making my neck hurt."

"You might want your personal space in a moment," Grantaire stalls.

Enjolras huffs, a familiar, frustrated burst of air. "Trust me to know what I want," she says, probably more sharply than she'd intended. "Please, I'm asking you to sit down."

The bed has more give in it than Grantaire's does. It feels like sitting on a marshmallow, and Grantaire has to adjust when she starts sliding off the edge. She doesn't ask if Enjolras is happy now, but Enjolras touches her bare knee anyways, radiates encouragement from the slant of her eyebrows.

"Honest about what?" she asks again.

At least sitting on the bed, Grantaire has a good reason not to meet Enjolras's eyes. She studies a spot near the ceiling where the present paint colour hadn't properly covered up its predecessor. "Honest about how I felt about you." She feels the slightest bit lighter. "I should've said I liked you, _really_ liked you, on Tuesday when you said you'd help me out with my situation tonight. And failing that, I definitely should've said something before we slept together, Jesus, I really…" She swallows. "I apologise, I didn't intend to put any of this on you."

"I'm confused," Enjolras confesses, when it becomes clear that Grantaire's not going to dig herself any further into that hole. "Are you apologising for liking me?"

Grantaire tears her eyes away from the paint to check that Enjolras's face matches her voice. It does; she still doesn't get it. "Not yet, though I'd do that too if you wanted me to," she says, mind working to rotate the lump of feeling she's trying to express, come at it from a clearer angle. "I'm apologising for not owning up to it before you agreed to go come to this thing tonight. I feel like I lured you in under false pretenses."

If anything, that makes Enjolras more confused. "You were the one who agreed to let _me_ come," she says. "And not saying you liked me… That's just your personality. I know you like all of us, whether or not you say it."

"You agreed to a fake date, not a, a Make-a-Wish one-night delusion for a big, rude bitch with ulterior motives," Grantaire says, growing a little frantic at having to say it. "You didn't know I had all these feelings for you."

Enjolras looks slightly frantic, herself. Grantaire's entire upbringing crows, _This is why we don't talk about feelings!_

"A--fake date, Grantaire, what the fuck does that mean? How was tonight fake?" Enjolras adds, not an afterthought, but something she's refusing to let Grantaire get away with, "And don't talk about yourself like that, not to me."

Grantaire's palms flip up of their own accord, like they're hoping answers are going to fall into them from the ceiling. "It was fake because it was fake! You're not actually my girlfriend, like…"

"I don't have to be someone's girlfriend to go on a date with them," Enjolras fires back, but unlike their disagreements last year, the spark behind her eyes doesn't seem to be annoyance, it's just pure incomprehension.

"This wasn't a _date_ ," Grantaire says. 

"We got dressed up," Enjolras enumerates on her long fingers as she speaks. "We went to an art show, we drank wine, we talked, we went back to mine, we _had sex_ \--what part of that was fake?"

"But you don't like me," Grantaire protests. She has a logical case, she's not going to let Enjolras make her feel like an idiot. "It's not a date if only one person likes the other."

Ah. She's found it, the thing that will make Enjolras pause in pursuit of the point that she wants to make. She wishes she could feel better about the wordless working of her jaw, the slow shake of her head.

"I didn't know you that well," is Enjolras's eventual rebuttal. "And I liked you anyways."

When she'd been in grade school, Grantaire's father had tried to coach her on how to deal with bullies. He'd said she should be more like a duck, and when that hadn't made any sense to her, he'd gone to the sink and poured his glass of water over his hand. _It doesn't stick_ , he'd said. _That's what you need to do, just don't let anything stick_. Grantaire had failed that lesson over and over and over.

Enjolras's clear, honest tone, the hand she reaches out with, her beautiful fucking eyes willing Grantaire to believe her… They all stick.

Grantaire sucks in a wobbly breath. 

"Besides," Enjolras says. "I had some ulterior motives of my own, if you want to put it that way." She lays her hand on Grantaire's thigh, drags her thumb along the lines of an inked trellis. Grantaire is distantly surprised that flowers don't sprout in its path, and then deeply embarrassed that she'd thought that. "I didn't like that we hadn't spoken in a long time. I didn't like that you were writing me off."

"Sorry," Grantaire says, though she's not feeling particularly remorseful about her self-preservation strategies. She loops her fingers around her left wrist, grabs, twists.

The hand on her leg is warm. "Why didn't you just say something?"

That, at least, she can answer. "You're so out of my league that we're barely even playing the same sport anymore." Grantaire grins with all her teeth, every bitter, crooked inch of them. "Make a play that crosses those lines, and you make everyone uncomfortable."

Enjolras rolls her eyes and tuts like she's eighty goddamn years old. "You say you like me, and then you say I'm shallow."

"It's not about being shallow," she says, and the fact that Enjolras went immediately to their respective appearances is… well, it's what happened. "I know it's bullshit, and prettiness isn't some price we pay to move through the world and all that, but it's still _there_. And besides," she plows on. "It's not just looks. It's everything else, too, you're just amazing. Extraordinary." She bites her tongue before it spouts anything more compromising.

Enjolras scoots closer to her so she can place her hand on the curve of Grantaire's backbone. Her knees press into Grantaire's leg, and her hair brushes Grantaire's shoulder when she leans close. "You're not so bad, yourself," she says. Her breath smells like mint.

Grantaire lets herself look at Enjolras from close quarters. The room narrows to the apples of her cheeks, her thick eyebrows, her full lips. Her eyes, trained on Grantaire.

"You do have a way with words, fearless leader," Grantaire says. There's a creak to her voice that belies the levity; she thinks Enjolras must hear it. "If anyone says otherwise, just let me know and I'll set them straight." She clenches her hands into loose fists, puts 'em up in a weak parody of squaring off to fight. When they fall, they fall onto Enjolras's knee.

"Thanks," Enjolras says. Grantaire can feel the edges of her kneecap, her tendons, her muscles. "It's good to have a fighter in my corner."

"Well, you were ready to have a go at St-Pierre, so it's only fair."

The room's too small now for a full laugh, but just the right size for the smile, the amused half-laugh Enjolras gives. "Only if he'd been rude," she says, and then turns so she and Grantaire are parallel, not perpendicular. She does it carefully enough that Grantaire's hands remain on her knee.

She asks what time Grantaire needs to be back for the showcase tomorrow, Grantaire answers. Enjolras sets an alarm, Grantaire avoids calculating how many hours remain until it sounds. Enjolras informs Grantaire that she'll be taking the window side of the bed, Grantaire pushes back because she can.

Enjolras turns off the bedside lamp, maneuvers Grantaire's limbs with exacting precision until she is comfortable. Grantaire lets her, trusts that the dark will mask the fondness in her expression.

They talk, though they aren't likely to remember exactly what they say when they wake up.

They fall asleep.

\--

Grantaire wakes up to predawn light dripping in around the edges of the curtain, and Enjolras's knee lodged in her side. She rolls away, doing her best not to disturb Enjolras (though frankly after that mistreatment, maybe Enjolras deserves a little disturbing).

A hairline fracture snakes through her heart when Enjolras makes an unconscious noise of protest.

"Shh," Grantaire says, and she licks her lips. Her mouth is dry, and her eyelids are so heavy.

Sleep hadn't withdrawn far. It's easy to find when she closes her eyes.

\--

Someone's saying something over a horrendous screeching noise. Grantaire doesn't care who it is or what they're saying, since they make the screeching end a few seconds later. The bed shifts as the person leaves, and Grantaire shrinks under the blankets into the newly-vacated warm space.

She falls back asleep thinking that it smells nice here.

It could be two minutes or two hours later when she hears Enjolras say, "Grantaire, you need to get up."

"No," she mumbles blearily. "I'm okay, go ahead."

Enjolras pulls the sheets off her _like a lunatic_. Grantaire cries out in shock and betrayal. "What the hell? Enjolras!"

"You need to get up," Enjolras says, merciless, and Grantaire can't believe this is happening.

"I can't believe this is happening," she says.

It's bright outside, which translates to a sort of muffled daylight in Enjolras's bedroom. It's light enough to see that Enjolras is dressed and mildly impatient. She's wearing a tiny smile as she bundles up the blankets at the foot of the bed. "It's nearly ten," she says. "If you want to have time to eat and go home before the show today, we need to be out the door in five minutes or less."

"Thanks, Mom," Grantaire mutters, rolling onto her side.

"Ew," Enjolras says, but she sounds entertained.

Grantaire groans and lets Enjolras bully her into borrowing a toothbrush, getting dressed (her underwear had been placed on the baseboard radiator last night, so it's a little gross but so much more wearable than it would otherwise have been), and stumbling out the door.

"I'm firm but fair," Enjolras says as she's locking the door behind them, and Grantaire deserves a small prize for not laughing out loud.

"What did you want to do for breakfast?" she asks instead.

It's strange to have Enjolras's focus like this, in broad daylight. Grantaire feels like she's doing something illicit when Enjolras takes her hand, follows Grantaire's lead to a cafe literally one block away that for some reason Enjolras had never tried before.

"There are more hipster cafes in Montréal, ma grande, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," Grantaire says wisely. "The world is wider than the Musain."

"And this way we're not going to run into anyone we know," Enjolras says. Grantaire slips on a little patch of ice, scrambles to catch her balance. "That's part of why you picked it, right?"

Grantaire stares at a pigeon in their path instead of meeting Enjolras's eyes. The pigeon doesn't show any signs of moving. "Part of it," she admits mulishly. 

"Did you want to do this again?" Enjolras asks. She presses her lips together, squeezes Grantaire's hand a little harder.

"Do _you_?"

The sun's too bright where it peeks through the buildings and reflects into Grantaire's eyes from a hundred office windows. "I asked you first."

"Obviously I want to," Grantaire says on a disbelieving laugh. Greedy, she's always been greedy. "How could you even _ask_ me--"

"Me too," Enjolras says, and then gives her a look that Grantaire interprets as saying that her laugh had transitioned from disbelieving to hysterical.

"Okay," Grantaire says, pushing the laughter back down into her lungs, letting it get absorbed by her diaphragm and ribs. "Okay, okay."

"It might not be exactly the same," Enjolras says. "What with you having successfully defended your thesis project and all that, we probably won't be going to another year-end show of yours."

Grantaire can feel the blood rising in her cheeks. Hopefully it just looks like a byproduct of the chilly weather, like Enjolras's scarf (borrowed last-minute at the door) hadn't fully protected her from the bite of the wind. "There's a last time for everything, I suppose," she says. "And just like all good things, all stressful and protracted undergraduate degrees must come to an end."

They walk the next couple steps in silence, or close to it. The hovering weight of the last few years presses at their backs, but they're walking forward, now.

Enjolras hums and says, "There's a Habs game tonight, isn't there?"

There is.

"When I'm done at the library," Enjolras starts, and Grantaire's heart is spinning giddily in the cavern of her chest. "We could meet up, watch it together."

"I don't know if you're ready for me at my hockey-est," she warns both herself and Enjolras.

"Have a little faith in me," Enjolras says, and Grantaire still finds she has a hard time denying Enjolras anything at all.

They get breakfast, and they part ways until a little later.

**Author's Note:**

> TRANSLATIONS!  
> 1 ta-da! [return to text]
> 
> 2 I still have a wild idea  
> of loving you for your purity  
> of loving you for a tenderness I've never known  [ ▲ ]
> 
> 3 you rise, you are the dawn in my arms [▲]
> 
> 4 oh hands  
> oh fists  
> fighters of mad tendernesses [▲]
> 
> 5 oh foolish freezing fire of the snow [▲]
> 
> 6 I know that all my love  
> will be returned, like a ruined garden. [▲]
> 
> 7 His heart disappointed, but his spirit rather naïve/hopeful [the beginning of a French pangram] [▲]
> 
> 8 "Yes, of course." [...] "If it would make you happy." [▲]
> 
> 9 "Oh, it would please me." [▲]
> 
> 10 "We must cultivate our (own) garden." [▲]
> 
> :> FACTS! (i like it when other people do facts)  
> \- Bossuet's Miron poem is [La marche à l'amour](http://www.pierdelune.com/miron1.htm)\--i highly recommend it if you read french!  
> \- [Nilima Sheikh](http://www.artic.edu/exhibition/nilima-sheikh-each-night-put-kashmir-your-dreams)'s painted tapestries are kinda jaw-dropping  
> \- i wanted REALLY BADLY to do a multilingual acronym pun; _les amis de la pomme de terre_ won because PDT sounds like "paix d'été" (summer peace? peace of the summer?) and while the spring of 2012 was (for many) hard, the summer was (for many) much quieter.


End file.
